The most recent KDnuggets poll asked, "Which data mining/analytic tools you used in the past 12 months for a real project". Amongst all commercial and open-source tools, open-source R was the second most-frequently cited, by 23.3% or about 1 in 4 respondents. (The most frequent was the open-source data mining tool, RapidMiner.) See ... [Read more...]

Last year's Rexer Data Mining Survey reported that R is used by more data miners than any other tool. If you're using R for data mining or data analysis generally, be counted at the 2011 Data Miner Survey (use access code: RL3X2), which closes in early June. Here's some background ... [Read more...]

The most visited post ever on the ‘Og was In{s}a(ne), my report on Radford Neal’s experiments with speeding up R by using different brackets (the second most populat was Ross Ihaka’s comments, “simply start over and build something better”). I just spotted two new entries ... [Read more...]

The latest prediction competition at Kaggle is literally "out of this world": the goal is to quantify the shape of 2-D images of galaxies from a simulated telescope, to test models for how invisible dark matter in the Universe distorts the images through gravitational lensing (as shown in the image ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

[This article was first published on Rmetrics blogs, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here) Want to share your [Read more...]

What can we learn about the difference in structure between a Ledoit-Wolf variance matrix and a corresponding factor model variance? Previously We’ve generated a set of random portfolios with constraints on the risk fractions of a Ledoit-Wolf variance matrix, and a corresponding set of random portfolios with risk fraction ... [Read more...]

“We don’t need likelihood functions; we just need to know how to simulate from [them] (…) We don’t need models with sufficient statistics; we just need summary statistics (…) We don’t need to be Bayesian; we just need to be approximately so. We don’t need theory to tell ... [Read more...]

Starting with 1 and spiralling anticlockwise in the following way, a square spiral with side length 7 is formed. 37 36 35 34 33 32 31 38 17 16 15 14 13 30 Read More: 597 Words Totally [Read more...]

[Read more...]

I was browsing through the draft abstract booklet for this year's worldwide R user conference useR! 2011, and noticed this abstract: KinectR – Kinect interface to R Landon Jensen Microsoft launched the Kinect for Xbox 360 in late 2010 and it quickly broke records as the fastest selling consumer electronics device in history (8 million ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

[Read more...]

Recently I found a post at FlowingData with a detailed tutorial to map connections with great circles with R. The tutorial of FlowingData is excellent, but I feel more comfortable with the sp classes and methods, and with the lattice and latticeExtra packages. Besides, I want to use the free ... [Read more...]

If your WordPress blog is hosted at WordPress.com (like this one), you may know that source code in posts is formatted and highlighted using a shortcode, as explained here. Until recently, R was not on the list of supported languages (neither was Perl), but I noticed today that both ... [Read more...]

It is possible to show that the square root of two can be expressed as an infinite continued fraction. √ 2 = 1 + 1/(2 + 1/(2 + 1/(2 + … ))) = 1.414213… By expanding this for the first four iterations, we get: Read More: 547 Words Totally [Read more...]

Some years ago, Google discovered that when people are concerned about influenza, they search for flu-related information and that to some extent, search traffic is an indicator of flu activity. Google Flu Trends was born. Illness is sweeping through our department this week and I have succumbed. It’s not ... [Read more...]

Hadley Wickham, the Rice professor and prolific R hacker best known as the author of the ggplot2 graphics package, will be coming to San Francisco June 8-9 to deliver his new R Development Master Class (in conjunction with Revolution Analytics). This course will build on the skills of basic R ... [Read more...]

Pete Warden's Data Science Toolkit (which we mentioned briefly last week) is an open-source information server that provides an API you can query for information useful for building data science applications, like identifying proper names in unstructured text, or converting IP addresses to lat/long coordinates. You can make queries ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]