A few days ago, I published a post entitled extracting datasets from excel files in a zipped folder, because I wanted to use datasets that were online, in some (zipped) excel format. The first difficult part was the folder with a non-standard character (the French é). Because next week I should ... [Read more...]

Recently, with @3wen, we wanted to play with isodensity curves. The problem is that it is difficult to get – numerically – the equation of the contour (even if we can easily plot it). Consider the following surface (just for fun, in order to illustrate the idea) __ f=function(x,y) x*... [Read more...]

The title of the post is a bit long, but that’s the problem I was facing this morning: importing dataset from files, online. I mean, it was not a “problem” (since I can always download, and extract manually the files), more a challenge (I should be able to do ... [Read more...]

The revised version of the paper Kernel Density Estimation with Ripley’s Circumferential Correction with Ewen Gallic is now online, on hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/. In this paper, we investigate (and extend) Ripley’s circumference method to correct bias of density estimation of edges (or frontiers) of regions. The idea of ... [Read more...]

Last week, with @3wen, we were working a the revised version of our work on smoothing densities of spatial processes (with edge correction). Usually, once you have revised the paper, some references were added, others were droped. But you need to spend some time, to check that all references are ... [Read more...]

Last week, @dmonniaux published an interesting post entitled l’erreur n’a rien d’original  on  his blog. He was asking the following question : let , and denote three real-valued coefficients, under which assumption on those three coefficients does has a real-valued root ? Everyone aswered , but no one mentioned that it ... [Read more...]

In a post publihed in July, I mentioned the so called the Goldilocks principle, in the context of kermel density estimation, and bandwidth selection. The bandwith should not be too small (the variance would be too large) and it should not be too large (the bias would be too large). ... [Read more...]

The National Hurricane Center (NHC) collects datasets with all  storms in North Atlantic, the North Atlantic Hurricane Database (HURDAT). For all sorms, we have the location of the storm, every six jours (at midnight, six a.m., noon and six p.m.). Note that we have also the date, the ... [Read more...]

A webpage for the book is now hosted on http://cas.uqam.ca/ So far, it is a very basic page, but information regarding the package can be found there. For instance, to install the package, with all the datasets, the R code is __ install.packages("CAS... [Read more...]

Last week, a student asked me about multiple tests. More precisely, she ran an experience over – say – 20 weeks, with the same cohort of – say – 100 patients. An we observe some size=100 nb=20 set.seed(1) X=matrix(rnorm(size*nb),size,nb) (here, I just generate some fake data). I can visualize ... [Read more...]

Over the past years, I’ve been living in different cities, all of them being completely different, compared with the others. I have been living in Paris, which is a big city in Europe, with a large neighborhood, too (la banlieue). Then, I’ve been living in Hong Kong, which ... [Read more...]

The book Computational Actuarial Science, with R is officially out. In the introduction of the book, and on the website of CRC, it is mentioned that the datasets can be found “in an R package on CRAN“, which is unfortunately incorrect. Some datasets are too large, so the package can ... [Read more...]

In June and July, I receive copies of two books, Social Media Mining with R, by Nathan Danneman and Richard Heimann Bioinformatics with R Cookbook, by Paurush Praveen Sinha For the first one, two recent interesting books deal with the same topic. Reza Zafarani, Mohammad Ali Abbasi and Huan Liu ... [Read more...]

A few months ago, in Men set to live as long as women, figures show, it was mentioned that (in the U.K.) the gap between male and female life expectancy is closing and men could catch up by 2030, according to an adviser for the Office for National Statistics. (the ... [Read more...]

Recently, there have been a lot of airplane accidents. July, 17th 2014, Hrabove, Ukraine, Malaysia Airlines, Boeing 777, fatalities 298 (/298) July, 23rd 2014, Magong, Taiwan, TransAsia Airways, ATR 72-500, fatalities 47 (/58) July, 24th 2014, Aguelhok, Mali, Air Algerie, Mc Donnell Douglas MD-83, fatalities 116 (/116) It is simple to find a lot of datasets about airplane crashes. For ... [Read more...]

Last week, Eric Chemi and Ariana Giorgi published an interesting article on “The Pay-for-Performance Myth” With all the public chatter about exorbitant executive compensation and income inequality, it’s useful to look at the relationship between chief executive officer pay and corporate performance. Typically, when the subject of their big ... [Read more...]

Yesterday evening, I uploaded a graph, with the labor productivity as a function of coffee consumption. Of course, it was for fun ! With this kind of regression, base on aggregated data, we can say almost anything, since most of them are correlated because of some (hidden) common factor, such as ... [Read more...]

On Twitter, I was asked if there were serious research papers published on coffee consumption and labour productivity. There are some papers on coffee breaks and productivity, e.g. Productivity Through Coffee Breaks, but I could not find anything on coffee consumptions. Since I could not find any dataset with ... [Read more...]

A few days ago, Jean-François Mignot published an interesting article entitled Tour de France 2014 : pourquoi le vainqueur gagne 100 fois plus que le 10e. In this article, we have the following graph, with the income of the cyclist, as a function of his final ranking (the data where downloaded from ... [Read more...]

Monday, I will be giving the closing talk of the R in Insurance Conference, in London, on Bayesian Computations for Actuaries, as to be more specific, Getting into Bayesian Wizardry… (with the eyes of a muggle actuary). The animated version of the slides (since we will spend some time on ... [Read more...]