The Google AI Challenge recently wrapped up with a Lisp developer from Hungary as the winner.  The competition challenges contestants to create bots that push the limits of AI and game theory.  These bots compete against one another, and a complete ranking of competitors is available.  The big story today ... [Read more...]

Mortgage rates have been at historic lows recently.  The rates are posted various places online along with simple mortgage calculators.  Such calculators illustrate the payment schedule for a mortgage based upon selected terms. But with less ... [Read more...]

'Indeed, I am moving on: my new project is about methods on how to domesticate the unknown, exploit randomness, figure out how to live in a world we don't understand very well. While most human thought (particularly since the enlightenment) has focused us on how to turn knowledge into decisions, ... [Read more...]

   Complaints about the iPhone App Store are not uncommon among developers.  The submission process is frustrating at best, you can expect arbitrary rejections, and Apple's policies have not always been particularly open or welcoming. &... [Read more...]

Yet another reason to check out the ggplot2 wiki! [Read more...]

     This is the second post (previous one here) that provides an analysis of Cramer's stock recommendations based upon the Mad Money Stock Screener as of 10/15/2010.Recommendations by SegmentAs mentioned in the previous post, ... [Read more...]

The 2010 ggplot2 Case Study Competition Winners have been announced!  Congratulations to the winners!Grand Prize: David Kahle, Rice UniversityFinalist: Michael Lavine, UMass Amherst Finalist: Claudia Beleites, TU Dresden & Uni.... [Read more...]

Bill Alpert of Barron’s has demonstrated the use of R in financial journalism as he criticized the performance of Jim Cramer’s stock picks.  Patrick Burns was an advisor for the analysis done in the article.  R was an important tool that allowed them to do their research as ... [Read more...]

Nicholas Taleb and Recent tweets indicate that Benoit Mandelbrot has died at age 85.  Mandelbrot was a French and American mathematician, best known as the father of fractal geometry.  His official biography at Yale does n... [Read more...]

In the twisting paths of human discovery, you never quite know what intellectual enterprise is going to result in a world changing discovery.  For instance, the mathematical notion of expected value did not grow up in a sterile, academic environment.   In 1654 Blaise Pascal was approached by Chevalier de Méré ... [Read more...]

Physical fitness has become increasingly technical and data driven.  I started running a bit in the last few months and have been delving into the prevailing wisdom related to assessing ones health as a baseline for pursuing various fitness goals.... [Read more...]

In the world of data preparation a common task is to identify duplicate records in a file or data set.  A few years ago, I did most development work in Java, and shudder to think of the amount of code required to accomplish this sort of task. &nbs... [Read more...]

Just announced:  World Bank Data features and data are available.  Previous posts have demonstrated how to access and plot this data using R (including the use of the R WDI package).  The chart above can be created using the following pr... [Read more...]

... or what I did on my summer vacation...Just got back from the Elder Research Two Day Course "Tools for Discovering Patterns in Data".  It was a great course that (while not R specific) provides a great overview of Data Mining tools and tec... [Read more...]

As announced by David Smith over at Revolution Analytics,  a ggplot2 Case Study Competition is on...   Rather than blogging for the last few days, I cobbled together an entry.  It is not a particularly mind bending use of ... [Read more...]

So if you had a robot that was an expert at botany - would you have a bot botanist?  Among other things, it would need to to distinguish flowers through vision and image processing, and be able to classify various kinds of plants based upon specif... [Read more...]

The NIST's The Engineering Statistics Handbook includes an Introduction to Time Series Analysis which provides a great way of demonstrating how R can be used to make such calculations.  This post replicates the analys... [Read more...]

Atte Tenkanen had a blog on fractals using R for a time. Much of his source code is still available online.  To produce his version of the Mandelbrot set:source('http://users.utu.fi/attenka/mandelbrot_set.R')Fractals (such... [Read more...]

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