Data from Zacks Research have just been made available on Quandl. Registered Quandl users have free preview access to these data, which cover the following: Earnings Estimates: forward-looking consensus forecasts; Earnings Surprises: estimated future and actual historical earnings; Earnings Announcements: predictions for earnings announcement dates, parameters, and supplementary data; Sales ... [Read more...]

A few years ago I ordered a copy of the 2005 edition of Creating More Effective Graphs by Naomi Robbins. Somewhat shamefully I admit that the book got buried beneath a deluge of papers and other books and never received the attention it was due. Having recently discovered the R Graph ... [Read more...]

Rachel Cunliffe shares this delight: Had the CNN team used an integrated statistical analysis and display system such as R Markdown, nobody would’ve needed to type in the numbers by hand, and the above embarrassment never would’ve occurred. And CNN should be embarrassed about this: it’s much ... [Read more...]

I have been looking for an intuitive way to plot flows or connections between states in a process. An obvious choice is a Sankey Plot, but I could not find a satisfactory implementation in R… until I read the riverplot post by January Weiner. His riverplot package does precisely what ... [Read more...]

In my previous post I gave some background information on the Commitments of Traders report along with a selection of summary plots. One of the more interesting pieces of information that one can glean from these reports is the shift in trading sentiment from week to week. Below is a ... [Read more...]

It has been suggested that the average Comrades Marathon runner is gradually getting older. As an “average runner” myself, I will not deny that I am personally getting older. But, what I really mean is that the average age of all runners taking part in this great event is gradually ... [Read more...]

I thought it would be fun to fit a simple model in Stan to estimate the abilities of the teams in the World Cup, then I could post everything here on the blog, the whole story of the analysis from beginning to end, showing the results of spending a couple ... [Read more...]

This one, from DominikM: Really great, the simple random intercept – random slope mixed model I did yesterday now runs at least an order of magnitude faster after installing RStan 2.3 this morning. You are doing an awesome job, thanks a lot! The post Comment of the week appeared first on Statistical ... [Read more...]

Having picked up a viral infection days before this year’s Comrades Marathon, on 1 June I was left with time on my hands and somewhat desperate for any distraction. So I spent some time looking at my archive of Comrades data and considering some new questions. For example, what are ... [Read more...]

It’s something that I do surprisingly often: concatenating a list of data frames into a single (possibly quite enormous) data frame. Until now my naive solution worked pretty well. However, today I needed to deal with a list of over 6 million elements. The result was hours of page thrashing ... [Read more...]

Andrew Tanentzap, William Lee, Adrian Monks, Kate Ladley, Peter Johnson, Geoffrey Rogers, Joy Comrie, Dean Clarke, and Ella Hayman write: We tested a multivariate hypothesis about the causal mechanisms underlying plant invasions in an ephemeral wetland in South Island, New Zealand to inform management of this biodiverse but globally imperilled ... [Read more...]

Yajuan Si, Natesh Pillai, and I write: It has historically been a challenge to perform Bayesian inference in a design-based survey context. The present paper develops a Bayesian model for sampling inference using inverse-probability weights. We use a hierarchical approach in which we model the distribution of the weights of ... [Read more...]

Most novice Comrades Marathon runners finish the race on their first attempt and the majority of them walk (shuffle, crawl?) away with Bronze medals. What is a Novice? To paraphrase the dictionary, a novice is “a person who is new to or inexperienced in the circumstances in which he or ... [Read more...]

In two previous posts in this series I have wrangled NEO orbital data into R and then solved Kepler’s Equation to get the eccentric anomaly for each NEO. The final stage in the visualisation of the NEO orbits will be the transformation of locations from the respective orbital planes ... [Read more...]

I have been thinking a little more about those mysterious negative splits. Not too surprisingly, this thinking happened while I was out running along the Durban beachfront this morning. Let’s have a look at the ten most extreme negative splits from Comrades Marathon 2013: Below are the splits data for ... [Read more...]

Following on from my previous post about Near Earth Objects, today we are going to solve Kepler’s Equation to find the eccentric anomaly, which is the next step towards plotting the positions of these NEOs relative to Earth. The Eccentric, True and Mean Anomalies The relationship between the eccentric ... [Read more...]

With this year’s Comrades Marathon just less than a month away, I was reminded of a story from earlier in the year. Mark Dowdeswell, a statistician at Wits University, found evidence of cheating by some middle and back of the pack Comrades runners. He identified a group of 20 athletes ... [Read more...]

The recent story about a skydiver nearly being hit by falling meteor got me thinking about all the pieces of rock floating around in near-Earth space. Despite the fact that the supposed meteor was probably just a chunk of rock mistakenly packed in with a parachute, the fact that something ... [Read more...]

Myfxbook provides an interface to your FOREX trading accounts as well as an active trading community. It has a broad range of functionality including a responsive interface to the FOREX market; tools for performing statistical analyses on your trades; the facility to mirror trades from other traders or systems; and ... [Read more...]

Kevin Cartier writes: I’ve been happily using R for a number of years now and recently came across Stan. Looks big and powerful, so I’d like to pick an appropriate project and try it out. I wondered if you could point me to a link or document that ... [Read more...]