SARS-Cov-2 (COVID-19) has been the defining driver of the market since its emergence. Understanding the progression of the disease through the world has been the secret sauce of alpha generation. Correctly parsing the early infectivity and morality data allowed some to avoid the COVID crash and a solid reading into ... [Read more...]

Okay, last one I swear. We just got updated results from the Pfizer-Biontech vaccine candidate. With 8 out of 170 cases belonging to the treatment group, the point estimate is remarkably similar to the Moderna preliminary results (~95% effectiveness). I will note that I was right in saying that the Pfizer-Biontech vaccine is ... [Read more...]

In a previous post we looked at the potential effectiveness of the Pfizer-Biontech vaccine candidate. Today Moderna announced interim results from their study. I have to say that their press release was quite a bit more informative than the Pfizer release. They report that only 5 of the 95 cases came from ... [Read more...]

tl;dr; The point estimate for vaccine effectiveness may be 97%, which is a lot higher than 90% Yesterday an announcement went out that the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine candidate developed by Pfizer and Biontech was determined to be effective during an interim analysis. This is fantastic news. Perhaps the best news of the ... [Read more...]

This is a public notice that Fellows Statistics is launching a service to provide HIV/AIDS testing sites with better access to their data and statistical products based on their data. [Read more...]

We are announcing the development of a new statistical user interface for R. I'm really excited about it and I hope that your will be too. Vivid is a rich document format deeply integrated with RStudio that mixes user interface elements, code and output. I firmly believe that the next ... [Read more...]

One of the great additions to the R ecosystem in recent years is RStudio's Shiny package. With it, you can easily whip up and share a user interface for a new statistical method in just a few hours. Today I want to share some of the methods and challenges that ... [Read more...]

Focus for books on R tend to be highly focused on either statisticians or programmers. There is a dearth of material to assist those in typically less quantitative field access the powerful tools in the R ecosystem. Enter Text Analysis with R for Students of Literature. I haven't done a ... [Read more...]

A new version of the OpenStreetMap package has been released to CRAN. OpenStreetMap 0.3.3 contains several minor improvements. I've removed the CloudMade tile set types, as they seem to have gone out of business. MapQuest has also been removed as they have moved to a new API. The mapbox type has ... [Read more...]

The standard way to represent an ordered set of numbers is with a binary tree. This offers a good mix of performance properties as the number of elements gets large. In particular it offers O(log(n)) operations insertion/deletion, O(log(n)) operations to find an element. Finding the ... [Read more...]

A new version of the OpenStreetMap package is now up on CRAN, and should propagate to all the mirrors in the next few days. The primary purpose of the package is to provide high resolution map/satellite imagery for use in your R plots. The package supports base graphics and ... [Read more...]

Ajay Ohri interviewed me on his popular DecisionStats blog. Topics discussed ranged widely from Fellows Statistics, to Deducer, to statnet, to Poker A.I., to Big Data.     [Read more...]

This is a quick note on profiling your compiled code on the mac. It is important not to guess when figuring out where the bottlenecks in your code are, and for this reason, the R manual has several suggestions on how to profile compiled code running within R. All of ... [Read more...]

This is a really great exposition on an infographic. Note that the design elements and "chart junk" serve to better connect and communicate the data to the viewer. The choice not to go with pie charts for the first set of plots is a good one. The drawbacks of polar ... [Read more...]

I'm usually quite a big fan of the content syndicated on R-Bloggers (as this post is), but I came across a post yesterday that was as statistically misguided as it was provocative. In this post, entitled "The Surprisingly Weak Case for Global Warming," the author (Matt Asher) claims that the ... [Read more...]

  The 2012 election is over and in the books. A few very close races remain to be officially decided, but for the most part everything has settled down over the last week. By all accounts it was a very good night for the Democrats, with wins in the presidency, senate and ... [Read more...]

  An update to the wordcloud package (2.2) has been released to CRAN. It includes a number of improvements to the basic wordcloud. Notably that you may now pass it text and Corpus objects directly. as in: #install.packages(c("wordcloud","tm"),repos="http://cran.r-project.org") library(wordcloud) library(tm) wordcloud("... [Read more...]

The book R for Dummies was released recently, and was just reviewed by Dirk Eddelbuettel in the Journal of Statistical Software. Dirk is an R luminary, creating such fantastic works as Rcpp. R for Dummies seems to have beaten Dirk's natural disinclination to like anything with "for Dummies" appended to ... [Read more...]

It is difficult for R package authors to know how much (if at all) their packages are being used. CRAN does not calculate or make public download statistics (though this might change in the relatively near future), so authors can't tell if 10 or 10,000 people are using their work. Deducer is ... [Read more...]

  I've been doing R/Java development for some time, creating packages both large and small with this tool chain. I have used Eclipse as my package development environment almost exclusively, but I didn't realize how much I relied on the IDE before I had to do some serious R/C++ ... [Read more...]