Over the years I convinced my colleagues and IT guys that R and LaTeX/XeLaTeX is the way forward to produce lots of customer reports with individual data, charts, analysis and text. Success!But of course the operating system in the office is still MS W...

On 7th December Google published a new version of their Visualisation API. The new version adds a new chart type: Stepped Area Chart and provides improvements to Geo Chart. Now Geo Chart has similar functionality to Geo Map, but while Geo Map requires ...

We need more data journalism. How else will we find the nuggets of data and information worth reading? Life should become easier for data journalists, as the Guardian, one of the data journalism pioneers, points out in this article about the new open ...

The London R user group met again last Wednesday at the Shooting Star pub. And it was busy. More than 80 people had turned up. Was it the free beer and food, sponsored by Mango which attracted the folks or the speakers? Or the venue? James Long, who or...

Fitting distribution with R is something I have to do once in a while.A good starting point to learn more about distribution fitting with R is Vito Ricci's tutorial on CRAN. I also find the vignettes of the actuar and fitdistrplus packag...

Data analysis is often an iterative and interactive process. However, when I present about this subject, I feel often limited by the presentation software I use. It doesn't matter if I use LaTeX/PDF, PowerPoint or Keynote. In all cases it is either ver...

Today we published version 0.1.5-1 of the ChainLadder package for R. It provides methods which are typically used in insurance claims reserving to forecast future claims payments.Claims development and chain-ladder forecast of the RAA data set using the Mack methodThe package started out of presentations given at the Stochastic ...

My 12" iBook G4 is celebrating its 8th birthday today! Time for a little present. How about R 2.14.0?The iBook is still in daily use, mostly for browsing the web, writing e-mails and this blog; and I still use it for R as well. For a long time it run R...

Using R with LaTeX via Sweave is a great way to create reproducible output. However, using specific fonts, e.g. your corporate fonts, can be painful with pdflatex. Over the last few weeks I have fallen in love with the TeX formatXeLaTeX and its XeTeX e...

How many R related books have been published so far? Who is the most popular publisher? How many other manuals, tutorials and books have been published online? Let's find out. A few years ago I used the publication list on r-project.org as an argument ...

Following on from my article about accessing and plotting World Bank data with R I want to talk about how to change the initial view of a motion chart.Over the last couple of weeks I have been asked a view times how to do this. For instance Stephen O'G...

Over the past couple of days I played around with the data sets of the World Bank, and I have to admit that I am blown away by it. It is amazing, to see what is available on their web site. It is worth visiting their Data Visualisation Tools page. ...

Let's talk about R in the insurance industry today.  David Smith's blog entry reminded me about our poster at the R user conference in Warwick in August 2011:Using R in InsuranceWe presented examples on how R can be used in the insu...

On 7 September 2011 I attended the London R user group meeting. It was a very good turn out with about 50 attendees at the Shooting Star, a pub close to Liverpool Street Station. The session started at 18:00 with four presentations, followed by drinks ...

It seems that you cannot include Google Visualisation Charts into a blog post directly.So, I tried to include the output of a googleVis function as a gadget, but also unsuccessful.Although you can include gadgets into your site template, it doesn't see...

We have published googleVis 0.2.9 on CRAN. The new version updates the package for the new features of the Google Visualisation API and brings an new in-page editor option. Here is a simple example, displaying the participants of the R user Conference...