A few days ago, Andrew Barr had a great post on his blog. It was titled, "R is not just for nerds....it has drop-down menus!" You can bet that this one caught my eye when it was re-posted on R-Bloggers.Briefly, Andrew takes us through the installation and basic ... [Read more...]

No matter what your favourite statistical package is, you'll find this post by Robert Muenchen highly informative.Robert concludes that:"By most of the measures discussed here, R is competing well with the commercial software vendors. However, I advise not over generalizing from this data. SAS and SPSS continue to ... [Read more...]

Yesterday, Haydn Shaughnnessy wrote a piece for Forbes titled, Who are the Top 20 Influencers in Big Data?Fans of R will be delighted to see David Smith of Revolution Analytics up there at number 2!Congratulations!© 2012, David E. Giles [Read more...]

Well, here we go again! It's time of year that we make all of those resolutions - the ones that usually get broken before the holiday decorations have been packed away. Not this year, though!In 2012, and in no particular order, I firmly resolve to:Increase my use of the ... [Read more...]

"Big Data" = data that come in amounts that are too large for current computer hardware and software to deal with. That sounds like fun!Norman Nie developed the well known SPSS statistical package in the 1960, and is currently President and CEO of Revolution Analytics, a California company that promotes the ... [Read more...]

If you're an econometrician and you don't use the R software environment - for at least some of your work, then you're missing out on all sorts of (free!) opportunities.Yes, it can be a steep learning curve, but it's worth every drop of sweat, and there are some great ... [Read more...]

A Halloween treat for R users! Version 2.14.0 was released today. Among other things there are big improvements for parallel processing. For a quick synopsis of the new "goodies", see the post on the Revolutions blog.© 2011, David E. Giles [Read more...]

I doubt if anyone would deny the importance of being able to reproduce one's econometric results. More importantly, other researchers should be able to reproduce our results to verify (a) that we've done what we said we did; (b) to investigate the sensitivity of our results to the various choices ... [Read more...]

In an earlier post I went through some econometrics that involved the problem of testing for multivariate cointegration in the case where there are one or more trend-breaks or level-breaks in the time-series data.  Specifically, I talked about the modified Trace tests introduced by Johansen et al. (2000), and I mentioned ... [Read more...]

In comments on a recent post, "Ben" and Tal Galili very sensibly asked if I could make R code available for the econometric analysis in my posts, in addition to EViews code. I'll be trying to do this wherever I can, given the time constraints.The important point implicit in ... [Read more...]

If you're a user of the R statistical software environment (and you should be - if you're not, it's the best free lunch in town), then the (fairly) recently released RStudio user interface will undoubtedly interest you. Here's a quote from the description on their website, to give you the ... [Read more...]