Here goes a little bit of my late experiences with R scripts. Comments, suggestions and/or opinions are welcome. Usefulness of R scripts Basic R script Processing command-line arguments Verbose mode and stderr stdin in a non-interactive mode Usefulness of R scripts Besides being an amazing interactive tool for data ... [Read more...]

Datasets come sometimes with predictors that take an unique value across samples. Such uninformative predictor is more common than you might think. This kind of predictor is not only non-informative, it can break some models you may want to fit to your data (see example below). Even more common is ... [Read more...]

This post deals with the basics of character strings in R. My main reference has been Gaston Sanchez‘s ebook [1], which is excellent and you should read it if interested in manipulating text in R. I got the encoding’s section from [2], which is also a nice reference to have ... [Read more...]

As I have described before, Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) can be seen from two different angles. The first classify a given sample of predictors to the class with highest posterior probability . It minimizes the total probability of misclassification. To compute it uses Bayes’ rule and assume that follows a Gaussian ... [Read more...]

Following my introduction to PCA, I will demonstrate how to apply and visualize PCA in R. There are many packages and functions that can apply PCA in R. In this post I will use the function prcomp from the stats package. I will also show how to visualize PCA in ... [Read more...]

I am glad to have found the R package GGally. GGally is a convenient package built upon ggplot2 that contains templates for different plots to be combined into a plot matrix through the function ggpairs. It is a nice alternative to the more limited pairs function. The package has also ... [Read more...]

I just got the excellent book Applied Predictive Modeling, by Max Kuhn and Kjell Johnson [1]. The book is designed for a broad audience and focus on the construction and application of predictive models. Besides going through the necessary theory in a not-so-technical way, the book provides R code at the ... [Read more...]

Creating molten data Instead of thinking about data in terms of a matrix or a data frame where we have observations in the rows and variables in the columns, we need to think of the variables as divided in two groups: identifier and measured variables. Identifier variables (id) identify the ... [Read more...]

Recently I had to define a R function that would compute the -th quantile of a continuous random variable based on an user-defined density function. Since the main objective is to have a general function that computes the quantiles for any user-defined density function it needs be done numerically. Problem ... [Read more...]

If you read my post about Fast Bayesian Inference with INLA you might wonder which models are included within the class of latent Gaussian models (LGM), and can therefore be fitted with INLA. Next I will give a general definition about LGM and later I will describe three completely different ... [Read more...]

I am currently a research fellow and 4th year PhD candidate within the INLA group.  If you deal with Bayesian models and have never heard about INLA, I sincerely think you should spend a small portion of your time to at least know what it is. If you have heard ... [Read more...]

Profiling R code gives you the chance to identify bottlenecks and pieces of code that needs to be more efficiently implemented [1]. Profiling R code is usually the last thing I do in the process of package (or function) development. In my experience we can reduce the amount of time necessary ... [Read more...]