Youtube is one of the channels the candidates for the US election use extensively to promote themself. Using the public Youtube API and the R package tuber it is pretty straightforward to create a snapshop of the online discussion and sentiment. First...
Here’s a problem I’ve had again and again: let’s say you’ve defined a statistical model with several parameters. One of them is a scalar. Another is a matrix. The third one is a vector, and so on. When fitting the model the natural thing to do is to write a likelihood function that takes as 
Recently I was surfing the web, when I came across a real cool post New R package to access World Bank data, by Markus Gesmann on using googleVis and motion charts with World Bank Data. The post also introduced me to Hans Rosling, Professor of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute. Hans Rosling, the creator of the famous … Continue...
A few weeks ago I worked on some old code parallelization. The whole process made me think about how efficient parallelization of the existing code in R can really be and what should be considered efficient. There is a lot … Continue reading →
Individual level data is essential to understand voting behaviour My previous analysis has occasionally come up against the problem “only individual level data could resolve that,”. Since I last wrote that, the New Zealand Election Study data for ...
The Mango Solutions team have done it again: another excellent Effective Applications of R (EARL) conference just wrapped up here in London. The conference was attended by almost 400 R users from companies all around the world, and was a really fun experience. I was honored to deliver a keynote presentation, alonside keynotes from Joe Cheng and Garrett Grolemund...
I’m currently getting the following error on a Windows machine: The machine in question is sitting behind a gnarly firewall and proxy, which I suspect are the source of the problem. I also need to use --ignore-certificate-errors when running chromium-browser, which points to the same issue. This seems to resolve the issue: The post Fixing “Peer certificate cannot...
As of today, there are 20 R packages that reverse depend/import/suggest (3/14/3) the pbapply package. Current and future package developers who decide to incorporate the progress bar using pbapply might want to customize the type and style of the progress bar in their packages to better suit the needs of certain functions or to create a distinctive look. Here is a quick guide to help...
anytime arrived on CRAN via release 0.0.1 a good two days ago. anytime aims to convert anything in integer, numeric, character, factor, ordered, ... format to POSIXct (or Date) objects. This new release 0.0.2 adds two new functions to gather conversi...
This note is a follow-up to the previous one. It shows how to use student-submitted keywords to find clusters of shared interests between the students. Dear students If you enjoyed my previous note, this one might also entertain you. And since your real first names are used in the data, you should be able to tell me later if...
The tidyverse is a set of packages that work in harmony because they share common data representations and API design. The tidyverse package is designed to make it easy to install and load core packages from the tidyverse in a single command. The best place to learn about all the packages in the tidyverse and how 
I am pleased to announced lubridate 1.6.0. Lubridate is designed to make working with dates and times as pleasant as possible, and is maintained by Vitalie Spinu. You can install the latest version with: install.packages("lubridate") This release includes a range of bug fixes and minor improvements. Some highlights from this release include: period() and duration() constructors now accept character 
In this set of exercises we shall create an empty graph and practice the functions for basic manipulation with vertices and edges, using the package igraph. If you don’t have the package already installed, install it using the following code: install.packages("igraph") and load it into the session using the following code: library("igraph") before proceeding. You
I spoke on 14th September at the EARL (Effective Applications of the R Language) conference in London. This is event is concerned exclusively with the R programming language and it was the first… Continue reading →
O'Reilly has released the results of the 2016 Data Science Salary Survey. This survey is based on data from over 900 respondents to a 64-question survey about data-related tasks, tools, and the salary they receive from doing/using them. The median salary reported in the survey was US$87,000; amongst data scientists in the US, the median salary was US$106,000. Appropriately...
I recently had an email exchange with a seasoned, well respected analytical professional which included the following (from them, not me): “… my versioning is to have multiple versions of files and to use naming conventions… it works really well....
Haveibeenpwned.com is a fantastic service that helps people find out if they’ve been involved in a data breach. HIBPwned is an R wrapper for that service. Recently, due to abuse of the system, Troy Hunt had to add a limit of one request per 1.5s. The new version published on CRAN last night adds a The post
We are delighted to note that IBM's BigDataUniversity.com has launched the quintessential introductory course on data science aptly named Data Science 101.The target audience for the course is the uninitiated cohort that is curious about data science and would like to take the baby steps to a career in data and analytics. Needless to say, the course is for...
As R users we mostly perform analysis, produce reports and create interactive shiny applications. Those are rather one-time performances. Sometimes, however, the R developer enters the world of the real software development, where R applications shoul...
As I’m in the industry now I figured I needed some business cards and as it seems the 90s never left us and Japanese monsters are hip again, I decided to make them Pokémon themed. I think they turned out pretty well, and here I’m just going ...
After scraping reviews from Goodreads in the first installment of this series, we are now ready to do some exploratory data analysis to get a better sense of the data we have. This will also allow us to create features that we will use in future analyses. Setup and data preparation We start by loading Related Post
This report describes changes in version 0.2 of the ‘DOM’ package for R. Version 0.1 of ‘DOM’ allowed HTML content to be added to a web page (or removed or modified); version 0.2 adds the ability to append SVG content … Continue reading →
The previous post in this series, showed a way to identify trading opportunities. The approach I implemented used time series daily data to identify good entry points in terms of risk-reward. The natural next step is to try to make use of these opportunities using machine learning. To refresh: the output of the previous post The post
I am happy to announce that my simputation package has appeared on CRAN this weekend. This package aims to simplify missing value imputation. In particular it offers standardized interfaces that make it easy to define both imputation method and imputation … Continue reading →
A new version of the OpenStreetMap package has been released to CRAN. OpenStreetMap 0.3.3 contains several minor improvements. I've removed the CloudMade tile set types, as they seem to have gone out of business. MapQuest has also been removed as they have moved to a new API. The mapbox type has been updated to use their
by Jaya Mathew, Data Scientist at Microsoft By using R Services within SQL Server 2016, users can leverage the power of R at scale without having to move their data around. Such a solution is beneficial for organizations with very sensitive, big data which cannot be hosted on any public cloud but does most of their coding in R....
The independent t test is used to test if there is any statistically significant difference between two means. Use of an independent t test requires several assumptions to be satisfied. The assumptions are listed below The variables are continuous and independent The variables are normally distributed The variances in each group are equal When these
imager is an R package for image processing, based on CImg. This new release brings many new features, including: Support for automatic parallel processing using OpenMP. A new S3 class, imlist, which makes it easy to work with image lists New functions for interactively selecting image regions (grabRect,grabPoint,grabLine) Experimental support for CImg’s byte-compiled DSL via 
anytime just arrived on CRAN as a very first release 0.0.1. So why (yet another) package dealing with dates and times? R excels at computing with dates, and times. By using typed representation we not only get all that functionality but also of the a...
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