Are students' teaching evaluations influenced by instructors' looks? ggplot2 may help find the answer.The recent release of RcmdrPlugin.KMggplot2 has made ggplot2 available to those who prefer GUI to the command line interface. With the new plugin for ... [Read more...]

Stata 12 has just been announced. The software will start shipping by the end of July.  A key new feature introduced in the new version is the module for structural equation models (SEM), a staple tool in marketing, psychology, and several other research disciplines.LISREL and AMOS have been the two ... [Read more...]

In an earlier post [Speeding tickets for R and Stata]  I had reported on how R compared with Stata for executing algorithms involving maximum likelihood estimation. This post  offers the following updates on the last post: Stata is in fact even faster than previously reported. The 64-bit version of the ... [Read more...]

How fast is R? Is it as fast in executing routines as the other off-the-shelf software, such as Stata? After some comparative experimentation, I found Stata to be 5 to 8  times faster than R. For me, speed has not been a concern in the past. I had used R with smaller ... [Read more...]

Imagine you have to analyze text comprising 18,000 words. You have to identify the most commonly cited ideas or words in the text and then present the analysis in a graphic format. There are sophisticated tools out there to help you with this task, but then again there is a tight ... [Read more...]

Despite being one of the most powerful computing platforms, and being free at the same time, R still struggles against other statistical software, such as SPSS and SAS, in gaining mass appeal amongst users of statistical and market intelligence software. Many have cited the absence of a user-friendly graphical user ... [Read more...]

Travel times and trip distances are at the core of urban economics. Many models of competition, housing markets, etc., rely on travel times or distances to explain the variance in economic outcomes. Determining travel times, especially non free-flow travel times (i.e., accounting for congestion) is however no trivial task. ... [Read more...]

A recent post listed at R Bloggers (https://www.r-bloggers.com/r-guis-which-one-fits-you/) made some erroneous statements about R Commander. Here is a revised description of R Commander with some issues addressed from the earlier blog:R Commander works ... [Read more...]