“The idea of imputation is both seductive and dangerous” (R.J.A Little & D.B. Rubin). Indeed, a predicted value is considered as an observed one and the uncertainty of prediction is ignored, conducting to bad inferences with missing values. That is why Multiple Imputation is recommended. The missMDA package ... [Read more...]

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A record of some more or less important events in the history of R. This is a work in progress. The information is cobbled together from a range of sources. If you have pertinent items to add, please let me know via the comments. 2020: useR! (... [Read more...]

The accidental aRt tumblr (mentioned here a few years ago) continues to provide a steady stream of images that wouldn't look out of place in a modern art gallery, but which in fact are data visualizations (mostly attempted in R), gone wrong. (Here's a typical recent entry.) But now, Giora ... [Read more...]

You’d almost think we were Europeans based on how much we’ve slowed down over the summer. Imad Ali, Jonah Gabry, and Ben Goodrich finished the online pkgdown-style documentation for all the Stan Development Team supported R packages. They can be accessed via http://mc-stan.org/(package_name), e.... [Read more...]

You’d almost think we were Europeans based on how much we’ve slowed down over the summer. Imad Ali, Jonah Gabry, and Ben Goodrich finished the online pkgdown-style documentation for all the Stan Development Team supported R packages. They can be accessed via http://mc-stan.org/(package_name), e.... [Read more...]

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INTRODUCTION R Markdown is one of the most popular data science tools and is used to save and execute code, create exceptional reports whice are easily shareable. The documents that R Markdown provides are fully reproducible and support a wide variety of static and dynamic output formats. Using markdown syntax, ... [Read more...]

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Calculating Gini coefficients Stats NZ release a series of working papers, and a recent one caught my eye because of my interest in inequality statistics (disclaimer - I am working at Stats NZ at the moment, but on completely different things). Workin... [Read more...]

This article describes solutions for preserving semi-transparency when saving a ggplot2-based graphs into a high quality postscript (.eps) file format. Contents: Create a ggplot with semi-transparent color Save ggplots with semi-transparent colors Use cairo-based postscript graphics devices Export to powerpoint Create a ggplot with semi-transparent color To illustrate this, ... [Read more...]

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Just getting back from the most fun meetup I have been to in quite some time: episode 23 (by their count) of Open Source Open Mic hosted by Matt Godbolt and Joe Walnes here in Chicago. Nothing but a sequence of lightning talks. Plus beer and pizza. S... [Read more...]

It is the nature of boot camp.  We drink from the firehose because we only have 12 weeks to learn what university programs would spread out […] The post An Iterative Approach to Data Science appeared first on NYC Data Science Academy Blog. [Read more...]

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Chatbots have become a rage since some time now, with firms from various sectors investing in such bots that would reduce or remove the need of employing a call centre whilst maintaining similar levels of efficiency, if not greater. A notable example i... [Read more...]

Sitting on top of R’s external pointers, the RcppXPtr class provides a powerful and generic framework for Passing user-supplied C++ functions to a C++ backend. This technique is exploited in the RcppDE package, an efficient C++ based implementation of the DEoptim package that accepts optimisation objectives as both R ... [Read more...]

Impact of the conservation optimism hashtag The hashtag #conservationoptimism became popular during the recent International Congress for Conservation Biology symposium. Michael Burgass asked me what its twitter impact was, so here is a quick analysi... [Read more...]

Given a short review of a product, like "I couldn't put it down!", can you predict what the product is? In that case it's pretty easy — it's for a book — but this general problem of text categorization comes up in a lot of natural language analysis problems. In his talk ... [Read more...]