Well, R is definitively here to stay and made its way into the data science tool zoo. For me as a statistician, I often feel alienated surrounded by these animals, but R is still also the statistician’s tool of choice (yes, it has come to age, but where are ... [Read more...]

Regression is one of the – maybe even the single most important fundamental tool for statistical analysis in quite a large number of research areas. It forms the basis of many of the fancy statistical methods currently en vogue in the social sciences. Multilevel analysis and structural equation modeling are perhaps ... [Read more...]

Each year after the group stage, there is the much awaited drawing of the eighth-final, which essentially defines a team’s fate. So far the thing is not too complicated, as there are 16 teams out of which we need to generate 8 games – no problem if it would be possible to ... [Read more...]

The gap of the new “digital divide” between those who only use computers when they are as easy to use as iPads and smartphones and those who like (or at least accept) to type commands to perform jobs, seems to get bigger and bigger. R – the lingua franca of statistical ... [Read more...]

I feel ashamed for this boring title, but hope that the entry can make up for it. This visualization did inspire me, as a comment did point to my Tour de France visualizations. As with all visualizations, we need data first – this sounds trivial, but is sometimes a frustrating show-stopper. ... [Read more...]

The new issue (Vol. 21, No. 2) is out now. Featured articles are: barNest: Illustrating nested summary measures by Jim Lemon and Ofir Levy You say “graph invariant,” I say “test statistic” by Carey E. Priebe, Glen A. Coppersmith and Andrey Rukhin Computation in Large-Scale Scientific and Internet Data Applications is a ... [Read more...]

There is this beautiful graph created by the facebook intern Paul Butler showing all (?) connections between facebook accounts: Paul’s article is called “Visualizing Friendships“, which I would more call “Visualizing connections between facebook accounts”, but that is probably a different matter. Although this is a beautiful piece of artwork, ... [Read more...]

I recently stumbled upon an old paper of a presentation I gave at the Interface conference in 1998, entitled “JAVA – the next Generation of Statistical Computing?”: It is very interesting to compare the things I envisioned 12 years ago and what actually came true. Here are some topics: Did Java change a ... [Read more...]

Peter Huber referred to “the rawness of raw data”, a kind of data we would not expect to find in a textbook. The book of Fahrmeir and Tutz on multivariate modelling refers to the visual impairment data from Liang et al., 1992 in table 3.12: Nothing wrong here at first sight; but ... [Read more...]

I never thought I would ever embed videos from FOX on my blog, but this one needs to be covered: Watch the latest business video at video.foxbusiness.com Watch SPSS co-founder Norman Nie talking about the “… unbelievably powerful open source language called R …” and “… I am not sure that ... [Read more...]

R did definitely not start to be THE statistical computing tool. The “two Rs” in far down-under just needed some tool which was not too expensive and structured enough to support the elementary statistics classes filled with hundreds of students. Another constraint was the computing lab which was large enough, ... [Read more...]

It is just about a year ago (exactly January 6th, 2009) that a New York Times article on R did fuel the dispute on what statistical analysis tool is “the best”. One of the highlight of the article was a quote from SAS’ Anne H. Milley: “I think it addresses a ... [Read more...]

As we are used from UNIX. there is not one single suitable solution to solve a problem, but usually a few different ways to do “the same”. Depending on what commands we know (best), we will chose the one or the other solution. Only the absolute expert will be able ... [Read more...]

Everything started with the article in the NYT talking about R – and of course – did mention SAS. Andrew Gelman picked up the article and posted his take on the matter. Maybe it are sentences like Andrew’s “And it’s good to hear that SAS is in trouble” and Anne ... [Read more...]