The most recent edition of the Revolution Newsletter is out. The news section is below, and you can read the full July edition (with highlights from this blog and community events) online. You can subscribe to the Revolution Newsletter to get it monthly via email. Quick Start Program for Hadoop: ... [Read more...]

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For the past 18 months, it seems like all I’ve heard about in the digital marketing industry is “big data”, and with that, mentions of using Hadoop and R to solve these sorts of problems.  Why are these tools the … Continue reading →Learning R has really made me appreciate SAS ... [Read more...]

I noticed in the development version of R the following note in the NEWS file: There is a subtle change in behaviour for numeric index values 2^31 and larger.  These used never to be legitimate and so were treated as NA, sometimes with a warning. [Read more...]

There's only a few days left to enter the Civic Data Challenge: entries are due before midnight EST on July 29 to qualify for the $100,000 in prizes. The competition, open to US residents, challenges particpants to applications and visualizations from civic health data. Prizes will be awarded by a panel of ... [Read more...]

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The RHadoop project continues the Big Data integration of R and Hadoop, with a new update to its rmr package. Version 1.3 of rmr improves the performance of map-reduce jobs for Hadoop written in R. New features include: An optional vectorized API for efficient R programming when dealing with small records. ... [Read more...]

I took part in the second Data Science London Hackathon last weekend (also my second hackathon) and it was a very different experience compared to the first hackathon. Once again Carlos and his team really looked after us. The data was released 24 hours before the competition started and even though ... [Read more...]

Estimating required hospital bed capacity requires a thorough analysis. There are a lot of ways of approaching a capacity requirement problem, but I think we can agree that a simple spreadsheet analysis just won't cut it. The approach described in this post makes use of discrete-event simulation and, just ... [Read more...]

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One of the shortcomings of regression (both linear and logistic) is that it doesn’t handle categorical variables with a very large number of possible values (for example, postal codes). You can get around this, of course, by going to another modeling technique, such as Naive Bayes; however, you lose ... [Read more...]

I provide links to two (free, publicly available) graduate level political methodology classes by Justin Esarey (Rice University) and Gary King (Harvard University). Both classes focus on statistical theory and modeling in R. [Read more...]

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The 16th problem is another big-number problem: 215 = 32768 and the sum of its digits is 3 + 2 + 7 + 6 + 8 = 26. What is the sum of the digits of the number 21000? This … Continue reading → [Read more...]

After watching 20 wonderful dancers of the 9th season of So You Think You Can Dance, I have presented a geomap of  the states where they are coming from (click here). Now, I am interested to this show’s history.  I’d like to re-draw the … Continue reading → [Read more...]

In a political party, there are as many cells as there are members and each member belongs to at least one cell. Each cell has five members and an arbitrary pair of cells only shares one member. How many members are there in this political party? Back to the mathematical ... [Read more...]

The June 2012 issue of the R Journal, the peer-reviewed open-journal about R packages and applications of R, is now available. This issue includes articles about: Efficiently calling C functions from R without the need for wrapper code Using clusters of Macs running Apple Xgrid for parallel distributed processing with R ... [Read more...]

Growing up in Australia, for me a carbonated drink like Pepsi or Fanta or lemonade was always just a "soft drink". (Also, 'lemonade' in Australia was something different to 'lemonade' in the US; it's something close to 7-Up.) So when I moved to Seattle, it was surprising to me that ... [Read more...]

Here are the slides for the second day of my course at Monash University, Melbourne, in the Special Lectures in Econometrics, with a strong strong similarity with the slides of my course in Roma this Spring. (Ah, sunny Roma…) The first day lecture was very well attended and I hope ... [Read more...]

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