The forecast package for R has undergone a major upgrade, and I’ve given it version number 3 as a result. Some of these changes were suggestions from the forecasting workshop I ran in Switzerland a couple of months ago, and some have been on the drawing board for a long ... [Read more...]

I’ll be giving a talk on Forecasting time series using R for the Melbourne Users of R Network (MelbURN) on Thursday 27 October 2011 at 6pm. I will look at the various facilities for time series forecasting available in R, concentrating on the forecast package. This package implements several automatic methods ... [Read more...]

Time series data are widely seen in analytics. Some examples are stock indexes/prices, currency exchange rates and electrocardiogram (ECG). Traditional time series analysis focuses on smoothing, decomposition and forecasting, and there are many R functions and packages available for those … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I recently discovered a fascinating series of technical reports from the 1970s in the Purdue University e-Pubs archive that shine a surprising light on what are now known as the Halstead metrics. The first surprises came from Halstead’s A Software Physics Analysis of Akiyama’s Debugging Data; surprising in ... [Read more...]

Some useful R code examples on  graphics are: Learn R Toolkit: It contains PowerPoint slideshows, videos, R scripts and data files to help Excel users move up to R. R code examples are provided for panel charts, conditional format, dot … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Well, version 2.0 is in the can and I’ll be uploading to CRAN over the next couple of days. Lets go over the highlights. Prior to version 2.0 we had basically 3 kinds of data flowing around the package: V3 14 column format, zoo objects and mts objects.  The 14 column format has always ... [Read more...]

A reader asked a question about data from   environment canada.  He wanted to know if that data could somehow be integrated into the RGhcnV3 package.  That turned out to be a bit more challenging that I expected.  In short order I’d found a couple other people who had done ... [Read more...]

A major upgrade of RTextTools has been released, including many optimizations, UI changes, and features based on feedback from the 2011 CAP Conference in Catania. Changes include the addition of a new low-memory algorithm GLMNET, full user documentation, simplification of the user interface, bundled datasets, better analytics for both virgin a [...] [Read more...]

As many have noted CRU have posted their data a bit ago and the usual gang has started to put it through the various “engines” for calculating a global temperature index. Thanks to others who worked this problem ahead of me getting the data in Rghcnv3 was not that hard, ... [Read more...]

I’ve spent some time forking myself. Over the past few days when I could steal away an hour here  or there I decided to make a big change to the package. But it’s a good change. First some book-keeping. The Romantest.R file has a minor bug in ... [Read more...]

It always strikes me as curious that some posts get a lot of love on Twitter, while others get many more shares on Facebook: What accounts for this difference? Some of it is surely site-dependent: maybe one blogger has a Facebook page but not a Twitter account, while another has ... [Read more...]

Here at HSL we have a lot of smart kinda-numerate people who have access to a lot of data. On a bad day, kinda-numerate includes myself, but in general I’m talking about scientists who have have done an introductory stats course, but not much else. When all you have ... [Read more...]

Fast on the heels of getting RomanM’s code up and running in RghcnV3,  Nick Stokes whipped out a version of his approach which he covered on his blog here: We exchanged code and few mails thrashing through details and I’m now in a position to start the integration ... [Read more...]

I’ve succeeded in getting a version of RomanM and JeffId’s Thermal hammer working with version 1.3 of RghcnV3. This is going to be a long post because there is a lot of ground to cover. First, some errata, the “Globe” demo in V1.3 appears to have a missing line, ... [Read more...]

Whew, For a few hours last night I struggled with a bug, err several bugs. In the end some of the bugs were mine, some of them were “upstream” and some of them were  far “upstream”.  Image  bugs in R 2.13.1. But the math bugs ( or flat out errors on my ... [Read more...]

Following on from my earlier post on creating a table of ICD codes in R, here is how I am currently counting these codes and storing the codes in a dataframe: Firstly create a dataframe to store the results in: hosp_count [Read more...]

A brief first post on what I hope will be a series of posts on analysing hospitilisation data, which is recorded using ICD codes (International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems) Initially here is an R file. This can be read in and will create a list, 218 long, ... [Read more...]

Since RTextTool's unveiling at the 2011 Cap Conference in Catania, the development team has been busy working on refinements to the package. This includes a number of changes to simplify the API, improve analytics, decrease memory use, and increase functionality. We've added support for another low-memory algorithm (GLMNET) in addition to ... [Read more...]

Tamino over at  Open Mind has a new post detailing his approach for calculating temperature averages. See his post here. His method is based on the Berkeley method as he notes and he uses it primarily for calculating regional or local temperature averages. Read his post for the math details ... [Read more...]

tl;dr Browse through Sarah Palin’s emails, automagically organized by topic, here. LDA-based Email Browser Earlier this month, several thousand emails from Sarah Palin’s time as governor of Alaska were released. The emails weren’t organized in any fashion, though, so to make them easier to browse, I ... [Read more...]