I overlooked blogging about this at the time, but Jari released a minor update to our Vegan package to fix a few issues following release of R 2.13-0. As far as the user is concerned, this mainly affects capscale(). metaMDSrotate(), … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Following a link on R-bloggers, I ended up on this page (with a completely useless graph that only contained the pieces of information 5% in 1900 and 55% in 2000). The author (Ralph Keeney) reports on “A remarkable 55 percent of deaths for people age 15 to 64 can be attributed to decisions with readily [...] [Read more...]

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A new version of the digest package (which generates hash function summaries for arbitrary (and possibly nested) R objects using any of the standard md5, sha-1, sha-256 or crc32 algorithms) is now on CRAN. Thanks to a patch by Mario Frasca, digest ... [Read more...]

In creating the numbers tool I wanted to be able to do two things, 1) obtain information about what source did by matching the numeric literals it contained against a database of ‘interesting’ values (now with over 14,000 entries) and 2) flag possible incorrect numeric literals (e.g., 3.1459265 when 3.14159265 had been intended in ... [Read more...]

I received this email today: I have a question about the ets() function in R, which I am trying to use for Holt-Winters exponential smoothing. My problem is that I am getting very different estimates of the alpha, beta and gamma parameters using ets() compared to HoltWinters(), and I can’... [Read more...]

Following up Conrad's 1.99.2 release (in RcppArmadillo 0.2.20), we now have Armadillo 1.99.3 en route to the upcoming 2.0.0 release. Armadillo is a templated C++ library for linear algebra---which RcppArmadillo brings to R based on our Rcpp library... [Read more...]

In R functions sometimes produces warnings or errors. In the case of errors execution of a function or a series of commands can get halted when an error occurs, which can in some cases be frustrating especially if we want to continue our calculations. There are various functions available in ... [Read more...]

In this, Chomsky is in complete agreement with O’Reilly. (I recognize that the previous sentence would have an extremely low probability in a probabilistic model trained on a newspaper or TV corpus.)1 Anyone who considers themself an intellectual should be required to read this new essay by Peter Norvig. ... [Read more...]

Through the webpage of the Advanced Monte Carlo Methods I & II, given a few years ago by Michael Mascagni at ETH Zürich, I found a link to the scanned version of the 1964 book Monte Carlo Methods by Hammersley and Handscomb. This is a short book, with less than 150 pages, ... [Read more...]

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This tutorial should illustrate how to employ bms with panel data. For the purpose of illustration we will use the data put forward in Moral-Benito (2011) and made publicly available at [Read more...]

Conrad Sanderson is preparing version 2.0.0 of his Armadillo templated C++ library for linear algebra and has released a first public beta version 1.99.2. This has been folded into a new release of the RcppArmadillo wrapper for R based on our Rcpp li... [Read more...]

bout half a year ago, I wrote a post on the configuration of (pgf)Sweave and LyX, which was intended to save us some efforts in going through all the details during the configuration. Now many things have changed: LyX 2.0 has internal support for Sweave, and fortunately I have been ... [Read more...]

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This post from Stephen Weller is part of a series from members of the Revolution Analytics Engineering team. Learn more about the RevoScaleR package, available free to academics as part of Revolution R Enterprise — ed. The RevoScaleR package, installed with Revolution R Enterprise, offers parallel external memory algorithms that help ... [Read more...]

Quick post on terrain classification, based on some trouble folks were having with a previous example on Windows. With the spgrass6 package, raster stacks are created by loading several GRASS files at once: x [Read more...]