At work I write a ton of SQL, and I do most of my querying using R.  The workflow goes: Create a string with the SQL in R Plug the string into fetchQuery (see my previous post) This solution works relatively well, but i’m a bit unhappy writing strings ... [Read more...]

I have a strong distaste for database connection management.  All I want to do when I want to query one of our many databases at work is to simply supply the query, and package the result into an R data.frame or data.table. R has many great database connection ... [Read more...]

I’ve just released my first R package! Over the past 1.5 years or so, I’ve been studying an obscure statistical model over ranking (full, or partial) data called Mallows’ model.  It hypothesizes that a set of sequence data has a “modal” sequence about which the data cluster, and that ... [Read more...]

I came across Dr. Peter Norvig’s blog about writing a basic spell-checker (http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html), and just had to try to implement it in R. Please excuse the ugly-ish code (I have not optimized it or commented it adequately at this point, but you can get the ... [Read more...]

My last post discussed a method to decode a substitution cipher using a Metropolis-Hastings algorithm. It was brought to my attention that this code could be improved by using Simulated Annealing methods to jump around the sample space and avoid some of the local maxima. Here is a basic description ... [Read more...]