After refactoring my programming so that it was only about 10 lines of code, using 12 functions I wrote an loaded in via the source command, I went through all the steps in Part 1 of this blog post and Part 2 of this blog post to set up the R package infrastructure using ...

In Part 1, I set up RStudio with usethis, and created my first Minimum Viable R Package (MVRP?) which was then pushed to Github to create a new repository. I added a README: Things were moving along just fine, until I got this unkind message (what do you mean NOT an ...

(What does this new package do? Find out here.) I have had package-o-phobia for years, and have skillfully resisted learning how to build a new R package. However, I do have a huge collection of scripts on my hard drive with functions in them, and I keep a bunch of ...

I started using R in 2004. I started using R religiously on the day of the annular solar eclipse in Madrid (October 3, 2005) after being inspired by David Hunter’s talk at ADASS. It took me exactly 4,889 days to figure out what this vexing error means, even though trial and error helped ...

This example is drawn from “A Painless Q-Learning Tutorial” at http://mnemstudio.org/path-finding-q-learning-tutorial.htm which explains how to manually calculate iterations using the updating equation for Q-Learning, based on the Bellman Equation (image from https://www.is.uni-freiburg.de/ressourcen/business-analytics/13_reinforcementlearning.pdf): The […]

Overview: Reinforcement learning uses “reward” signals to determine how to navigate through a system in the most valuable way. (I’m particularly interested in the variant of reinforcement learning called “Q-Learning” because the […]

Every student learns how to look up areas under the normal curve using Z-Score tables in their first statistics class. But what is less commonly covered, especially in courses where calculus is […]

Want to do a quick, exploratory data analysis in R of your data that’s stored in a spreadsheet on Google Drive? You’re in luck, because now you can use the new xda […]

Yesterday, I wrote about how to use gluc‘s new ahp package on a simple Tom-Dick-Harry one level decision making problem using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). One of the cool things about that […]

On my December to-do list, I had “write an R package to make analytic hierarchy process (AHP) easier” — but fortunately gluc beat me to it, and saved me tons of time […]

Are you an instructor with a Spring 2016 intro to statistics course coming up… and yet you haven’t started preparing? If so, I have a potential solution for you to consider. The materials […]

There are many different techniques that be used to model physical, social, economic, and conceptual systems. The purpose of this post is to show how the Kermack-McKendrick (1927) formulation of the SIR […]

I was so excited about my initial foray into Shiny development using jennybc‘s amazing googlesheets package that I stayed up half the night last night (again) working on my second Shiny app: […]

I’ve been meaning to learn Shiny for 2 years now… and thanks to a fortuitous email from @ImADataGuy this morning and a burst of wild coding energy about 5 hours ago, I […]

Statistical process control provides a mechanism for measuring, managing, and controlling processes. There are many different flavors of control charts, but if data are readily available, the X-Bar/R approach is often used. […]