A new version of the ropensci magick package has been released to CRAN. Magick is a package for Advanced Image-Processing in R. It wraps the ImageMagick STL which is perhaps the most comprehensive open-source image processing library available today. Our original announcement has more details. New features This new version now includes a beautiful vignette which gives an...
The R package development is a complex process of creating (mostly) a useful software, that will (probably) be used by other users. This means the provided tool should be resistant, immune, well tested and properly documented. Developers from many dif...
googleformr For the past few months I’ve been toying with the idea of using googleformr to empower data science-oriented instructors to use data science in their workflow. In this 2-part series of posts, I’ll show how to AppScripts and R to turn...
Joe Thorley at Poisson Consulting has released a new R package, rtide, (on which I am listed as a co-author) that provides the ability to predict future (and past) tide heights for 637 different tide stations in the United States and associated territories. The underlying data, consisting of tide harmonic constituents, are collected and released
This animated gif shows changes in annual mean temperature at 12 East Coast USA airports that had continuous daily data for the 1950 – 2015 period. The data was retrieved from Weather Underground using the R weatherData package . 11 … Continue reading →
Spark 2.0 has been released since last July but, despite the numerous improvements and new features, several annoyances still remain and can cause headaches, especially in the Spark machine learning APIs. Today we’ll have a look at some of them, inspired by a recent answer of mine in a Stack Overflow question (the question was about Spark 1.6 but,...
Previously in this series: Cleaning and visualizing genomic data: a case study in tidy analysis Modeling gene expression with broom: a case study in tidy analysis In previous posts, I’ve examined the benefits of the tidy data framework in cleaning, visualizing, and modeling in exploratory data analysis on a molecular biology experiment. We’re using Brauer et al...
One of the first steps of data analysis is the descriptive analysis; this helps to understand how the data is distributed and provides important information for further steps. This set of exercises will include functions useful for one variable descriptive analysis, including graphs. Before proceeding, it might be helpful to look over the help pages
First satRdays in Budapest September 03, 2016 event is completed. This one day, community driven event with regional for very affordable prices, good for networking, getting latest from R community event is over. And it was a blast! Great time, nice atmosphere, lots of interesting people and where there is a good energy, there is … Continue...
Tell me, which side of the earth does this nose come from? Ha! (ALF) Reading about strange attractors I came across with this book, where I discovered a way to generate two dimensional chaotic maps. The generic equation is pretty simple: I used it to generate these chaotic galaxies: Changing the vector of parameters you … Continue...
We released googleVis version 0.6.1 on CRAN last week. The update fixes issues with setting certain options, following the switch from RJSONIO to jsonlite. Screen shot of some of the Google ChartsNew to googleVis? The package provides an interface betw...
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...
In this post, I will talk about an alternative way to choose quantiles (and more broadly, decision boundaries) for statistical tests, the ones you choose in order to have a 95% confidence interval (5% of type-I error). I will then show that this idea can be used to combine tests. I will use some illustrations in R to make...
“…the chosen statistic needs to be a so-called sufficient statistic in that any information about the parameter of interest which is contained in the data, is also contained in the summary statistic.” Elise Jenningsa and Maeve Madigan arXived a paper on a new Python code they developed for implementing ABC-SMC, towards astronomy or rather cosmology 
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live. – Martin Golding In previous posts, I had discussed how Rperform can be used to obtain and visualize package performance data. However, real-world software development is a collaborative process. Thus, automating performance testing for your package is...
Last few days to purchase your tickets for the UK’s biggest R Conference this year! On September 13th-15th at The Tower Hotel, London, the conference has 1 day of workshops which are selling up fast and 2 days of conference with … Continue reading →
The pretty pictures from my empirical software engineering book are now online, along with the 210 data sets and R code (330M). Plotting the number of data sets in each year shows that empirical software engineering has really taken off in the last 10 years (code+data). Around dozen or so confidential data sets are not
![Matlab goes deep [learning]](https://xianblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/deepearnings.jpg?w=450&h=163)
A most interesting link I got when reading Le Monde, about MatLab proposing deep learning tools…Filed under: Books, pictures, R, Statistics, University life Tagged: deep learning, Le Monde, Matlab
As we continue to program in R, all of us would have inevitably encountered multiple errors or bugs in our code. Not all programming errors are created equal – Many of the errors we encounter are pretty straight-forward to deal with, with clear, unambiguous error messages that a little googling (or reading the help documentation) Related Post
How to use R to draw 3D scatterplots in Minecraft? Let’s see. Minecraft is a game about placing blocks and going on adventures (source). Blocks are usually placed by players but there are add-ons that allow to add/modify/remove blocks through external API. And this feature is being used in educational materials that show how to … Czytaj...
The seventh update in the 0.12.* series of Rcpp just arrived on the CRAN network for GNU R as well as in Debian. This 0.12.7 release follows the 0.12.0 release from late July, the 0.12.1 release in September, the 0.12.2 release in November, the 0.12.3 release in January, the 0.12.4...
An interesting question about stratified sampling came up on X validated last week, namely how to optimise a Monte Carlo estimate based on two subsequent simulations, one, X, from a marginal and one or several Y from the corresponding conditional given X, when the costs of producing those two simulations significantly differ. When looking at 
Did you ever feel knowing exactly what you wanted, but couldn’t find it in a mountain of information? We know how you feel… As the mountain of R courses and tutorials continues to get bigger, we need smart tools to quickly find those that meet our needs best. So, we built the R Course Finder
Introduction Saving your R dataframe to a .csv can be useful; being able to view the data all at once can help to see the bigger picture. Often though, multiple dataframes, all pieces of the same project, need to be viewed this way and related back to...
Next week will be the meeting of the German (and Swiss and Austrians) ecologists in Marburg and the organizing team launched a visualization contest based on spatial data of the stores present in the city. Nadja Simons and I decided to enter the contest, our idea was to link the store data to the city … Continue...
Fresh, and slightly dizzy, from my foray into Quantum Computing with IBM’s Quantum Experience, I now turn my attention to IBM’s Data Science Experience (DSE). I am on the verge of completing a really great 3 module ‘Data Science and Engineering with Spark XSeries’ from the University of California, Berkeley and I have been thinking … Continue...
Weak institutions and natural resource abundance are a recipe for civil conflict and the overexploitation of natural resources. In our forthcoming paper with the title “Take what you can: property rights, contestability and conflict”, Samuel Marden and I present evidence from Brazil indicating that insecure property rights are a major cause of land related conflict … Continue...
Writing a book is a sacrifice. It takes a lot of time, represents a lot of missed opportunities, and does not (directly) pay very well. If you do a good job it may pay back in good-will, but producing a serious book is a great challenge. Nina Zumel and I definitely troubled over possibilities for … Continue...
Nobody knows how to say goodbye, It seems so easy until you try (Nobody Knows, The Lumineers) I have been user of WordPress.com for (almost) three years and it has been a very good experience. But I want to take more control of my blog: install plugins, manage ads (someone interested out there to publicize in my … Continue...
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