I meant to blog about the R/Finance conference during a lull, but I didn’t find too many. Unlike many conferences I’ve been to the structure of R/Finance was simple: one room and one speaker at a time. Relying on each … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Heads-up to anyone attending the sold-out Data Science Summit in Las Vegas this week: I'll be there tomorrow and Thursday for the conference and to discuss R on the panel discussion "Data Science Toolset - Recipes That Win" (more details about the panel discussion below.) I'm looking forward to meeting ... [Read more...]

After a week's worth of work in the field, I typically have several pages of hand-written field notes that are associated with GPS waypoints-- badly in need of some kind of transcription/organization. I have yet to find a simple approach for bringing t... [Read more...]

Wunderground Example The Wunderground.com website offers several creative interfaces to current and historic weather information. One of the more interesting features is the URL-based interface to personal weather stations. As far as I can tell, the Wu... [Read more...]

The Rmetrics Association is once again holding its annual Workshop and Summer School on Computational Finance and Financial Engineering at Meielisalp (on Lake Thune in Switzerland) from June 26-30. Now in its fifth year, the workshop consists of Summer School-like tutorial sessions and a user/developer meeting: Both focus on ... [Read more...]

I wrote this post months ago but never hit 'Publish'. But, the subject has changed little since then. So, here's to cleaning out the draft folder... R's connections are the heart of data/code/text input and output. Without connections, R would be crippled. Additional connections make R more ... connected ... [Read more...]

Upgrading from R-2.12 to R-2.13 was fairly painless, except for one minor hiccup in trying to get the 64-bit version running on my installation of Eclipse + StatET under Windows 7. The setup instructions are almost entirely the same as I have outlined ... [Read more...]

I have started redoing the source code measurements that appear in my C book, this time using a lot more source, upgraded versions of existing tools, plus some new tools such as Coccinelle and R. The intent is to make the code and data available in a form that is ... [Read more...]

In this post, I’ll be graphing some results from a recent referendum held here in the UK and combining it with the results of a set of local elections that were held at the same time. I’ll give some examples of graphing stuff using ggplot2 and will also ... [Read more...]

For the past few meetings of the Greater Boston useR Group, we have been opened with an introductory “useR Vignette” talk on a topic which may be helpful for new R users. This week, I presented an overview of accessing databases from R. Several people have tweeted and blogged nice ... [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...]

In Tangente n⁰42, there was a [Latter, 1902] dataset about the size of cuckoo eggs against the species (goldcrest and warbler) which built the nest. (The whole dataset from Latter is analysed in Maindonald and Braun’s Data Analysis and Graphics Using R, with a degree of caution about how trustworthy ... [Read more...]

SocialFlow's blog has a great case study today on how news from a single tweet -- in this case, speculation made an hour before the President's announcement that Osama bin Laden had been killed -- can propagate through social networks. At 10:24 p.m. EST on Sunday May 1, Keith Urbahn tweeted: "... [Read more...]

The above graph borders on chartjunk (and is nothing like Paul Butler’s amazing Facebook map). We can see some variation in color but mostly it is a set of lines between 152 country capitals with no means to determine which … Continue reading → [Read more...]

When you draw a histogram, an important question is “how many bar should I draw?”. This should inspire an indignant response. You didn’t become a programmer to answer questions, did you? No. The whole point of programming is to let your computer do your thinking for you, giving you ... [Read more...]

I’m helping out some colleagues learn programming from having zero experience with it in any shape or form. It’s quite a daunting task in some senses, because, well, it may not be easy! They are researchers, so they’ll need it for processing data and generating output, and ... [Read more...]

Version of 0.3.0 of the Bayesian Model Averaging package BMS has been released. Apart from numerous bugfixes, BMS 0.3.0 includes two main additions: The ability in bms to keep certain fixed regressors to be included in all sampled models The option t... [Read more...]

Today mostly existed in adding details or changing certain aspects of my graphs. For example, I had to turn around the y-axis on my levelplot, circleplot, … which wasn’t so easy at first. But after a bit of googling I found out I had to rev... [Read more...]

Today I had a meeting with Emmanuel. He is a guy from inside Janssen who is very good with R-scripts. He made a lot of great plots which I had to use for our reports. During the meeting we came to a conclusion that all the difficult R-scripting he did,... [Read more...]