Thanks to Jim, I’ve been using R in the shell more and more – in concert with vi. It’s been fun, and nice to integrate my workflows all on the server (although I haven’t had to do much graphing yet – I’m sure I’ll start kvetching then ... [Read more...]

Below are some links to a patch against the R-2.12.2 source code that implements a tty connection for R. Since the release of R-2.13.0 is coming soon, I’ll have a patch for it soon also. What’s a tty connection? The tty connection is an R interface to computer ... [Read more...]

I few years ago, while I was working on kernel based density estimation on compact support distribution (like copulas) I went through a series of papers on circular distributions. By that time, I thought it was something for mathematicians working ... [Read more...]

Heritage Health and Kaggle have teamed up to create the biggest data science competition thus far: the Heritage Health Prize, which challenges competitors to build a statistical model to predict the number of days a person is likely to spend in hospital over the next year, based on (anonymized) factors ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

[Read more...]

[Read more...]

Working on some new ideas on how map unit data can be summarized on small screens-- particularly for our mobile version of SoilWeb. The distance from the nearest map unit polygon boundary is now printed above mini soil profile sketches. This gives the ... [Read more...]

Exercise 4 is all about using Newton's Method to implement logistic regression on a classification problem. For all this to make sense i suggest having a look at Andrew Ng machine learning lectures on openclassroom. We start with a dataset representing 40 students who were admitted to college and 40 students who were ... [Read more...]

A quick reminder that Revolution Analytics' CTO David Champagne will be hosting a live webinar tomorrow (March 16) on Integrating R into 3rd Party and Web Applications Using RevoDeployR. Designed for application developers, this webinar will cover publishing R scripts to the RevoDeployR server, and integrating their results into Web applications, ... [Read more...]

The Orange County R User Group was formed to bring local R users together in a friendly, business-oriented environment. This is the fifth R user group in California. Founder Ray DiGiacomo, Jr. says, "I feel this group is necessary because the current Los Angeles and San Diego R User Groups ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

No need to do politics. Just take a statistical course. And I do not talk about misinterpretation of statistics, but I talk about the mathematical foundations of statistical tests. Consider the following parametric test, with a one-dimensional para... [Read more...]

I received an email today with the following comment: I’m using ARIMA with Intervention detection and was planning to use your package to identify my initial ARIMA model for later iteration, however I found that sometimes the auto.arima function returns a model where AR/MA coefficients are not ... [Read more...]

As you may know, today is Pi Day, when all good nerds take a moment to thank the geeks of antiquity for their painstaking work in estimating this marvelous mathematical constant. It is also a great opportunity to thank contemporary geeks for the wonders of modern computing, which allow us ... [Read more...]

Last month, Amanda Cox from The New York Times Graphic Department gave a great talk to the NYC R Statistical Programming Meetup. I’ve just got around to uploading the video, which has been broken into a part one and part two. You can also view the videos embedded after ... [Read more...]

Those in the political science discipline probably remember their first encounter with poliscijobrumors.com. For those outside, you have probably never heard of this particular message board, and you would have no reason to. As the URL suggests, the board specializes in rumor, gossip, back-bitting, mudslinging, and the occasional lucid ... [Read more...]

As announced yesterday by the R Core Team, the next major update to R will be released on April 13. R 2.13.0 is the next major release of R, which gets major updates approximately every six months. This also indicates that R 2.12.2 is the last patch level of the R 2.12 series, and ... [Read more...]

I have recently discovered memisc, an extremely useful R package by Martin Elff (see his memisc page here). The package contains any number of useful functions, and is particularly good at helping one manage and recode survey data. However, by far my … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I was recently pointed in the direction of a thermal comfort model by the engineering company Arup (p27–28 of this pdf). Figure 3 at the top of p28 caught my attention. It’s mostly a nice graph; there’s not too much junk in it. One thing that struck me was ... [Read more...]