R can be used to perform various matrix calculations. This include functions for creating matrices (matrix), addition (+), multiplication (%*%) and inversion (solve). Fast Tube by Casper Other useful resources are provided on the Supplementary Material... [Read more...]

There are situations where we might want to run R on a standalone machine so need to download a (potentially) large number of packages to install on this system. Rather than having to through the pain of searching through CRAN to find the packages and all the dependencies and manually ... [Read more...]

The work of Edward Tufte is worth reading if you are interested in designing meaningful graphs and removing chart junk from your displays. [Read more...]

There are a number of good open source projects for statistics and data mining, for example the software WEKA developed at the University of Waikato. The description on their website states that: Weka is a collection of machine learning algorithms for data mining tasks. The algorithms can either be applied ... [Read more...]

As many people are aware Hans Rosling is an enthusiastic swedish academic with a passion for statistics who recently presented the program The Joy of Stats. One of the great things about Hans Rosling is his presentations and the interactive graphics that he uses to make his points. Fast Tube ... [Read more...]

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Following on from the initial post about creating a document using LaTeX we need to consider the structure of the document, i.e. headings and page layout. Fast Tube by Casper Document Class The document class is a template that specifies the appearance of different components of a document, e.... [Read more...]

Following on from the previous post about creating a football result processing function for data from the football-data.co.uk website we will add code to the function to generate a league table based on the results to date. To create the league table we need to count various things ... [Read more...]

The LaTeX typesetting is used to create professional looking documents on a home computer. It may have a steeper learning curve than using a Word Processor, but this initial effort will often pay off reasonably quickly. The system is almost a necessity for anyone writing documents with a large amount ... [Read more...]

In this post we will make use of football results data from the football-data.co.uk website to demonstrate creating functions in R to automate a series of standard operations that would be required for results data from various leagues and divisions. The first step is to consider what control ... [Read more...]

There are a number of useful functions in R that test the variable type or convert between different variable types. These can be used to validate function input to ensure that sensible answers are returned from a function or to ensure that the function doesn’t fail. Following on from ... [Read more...]

In previous posts (here and here) we created a simple function that returns a single numeric value. In some situations it may be more useful to return a more flexible data type, such as a list object, to provide more information about the calculations that have been performed. We can ... [Read more...]

In a previous post we considered writing a simple function to calculate the volume of a cylinder by specifying the height and radius of the cylinder. The function did not have any checking of the validity of the function arguments which we will consider in this post. R has various ... [Read more...]

One of the benefits of using R for statistical analysis is the programming language which allows users to define their own functions, which is particularly useful for analysis that needs to be repeated. For example, a monthly output from a database may be provided in a pre-determined format and we ... [Read more...]

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Transitions are often used in presentations to break up the presentation and to keep the audience awake, but often the outcome is irritation/distraction with text or other objects flying on or off the screen from different directions. As such they should be used sparingly if at all in a ... [Read more...]

Overlays can be used in a LaTeX beamer presentation to reveal parts of a slide sequentially, which can be a useful way of imparting information to your audience. There are a number of different ways that overlays can be created depending on the sophistication required in the presentation. Fast Tube ... [Read more...]

Cricket is a sport that generates a large volume of performance data and corresponding debate about the relative qualities of various players over their careers and in relation to their contemporaries. The cricinfo website has an extensive database of statistics for professional cricketers that can be searched to access the ... [Read more...]