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In this post, we'll look at a simple method to identify segments of an image based on RGB color values. The segmentation technique we'll consider is called color quantization. Not surprisingly, this topic lends itself naturally to visualization and R makes it easy to render some really cool graphics for ... [Read more...]

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This post is another tour of quadratic programming algorithms and applications in R. First, we look at the quadratic program that lies at the heart of support vector machine (SVM) classification. Then we'll look at a very different quadratic programming demo problem that models the energy of a circus tent. ... [Read more...]

This post is another tour of quadratic programming algorithms and applications in R. First, we look at the quadratic program that lies at the heart of support vector machine (SVM) classification. Then we'll look at a very different quadratic programming demo problem that models the energy of a circus tent. ... [Read more...]

The California Health Interview Survey (CHIS) is a remarkable biannual survey of health status, care access, and demographics for California residents. The 2011-2012 public use survey data has recently been released and is freely available after registering at the CHIS site. CHIS currently offers data in SAS, Stata, and SPSS ... [Read more...]

The MathWorks has an interesting demo on how the shape of a circus tent can be modeled as the solution of a quadratic program in MATLAB. In this post, we'll show how to solve this same problem in R using the quadprog package and also provide the technical details not ... [Read more...]

R's igraph package provides a simple and flexible set of utilities for working with graphs.  In this post, we'll use this package to animate the simulated spread of a disease through a network. Graphs A graph is just a collection of nodes joined by edges: require(igraph)# Specify an undirected ... [Read more...]

In this post, we'll explore a special type of nonlinear constrained optimization problems called quadratic programs. Quadratic programs appear in many practical applications, including portfolio optimization and in solving support vector machine (SVM) classification problems. There are several packages available to solve quadratic programs in R. Here, we'll work with ... [Read more...]

Stock ticker symbols are short character string codes (AAPL for Apple, WMT for Walmart) that uniquely identify stock listings. They originate from the days when stock quotes were transmitted via telegraph. These symbols are often used as tools for branding and companies choose them to be memorable and easily recognized. ... [Read more...]