Well, so much for that #march11 #Saudi day of rage.  Whether it was really the "tempest in a teacup" that  Prince Al-Waleed suggested on CNBC (video below, transcript here) or not, the oil complex and Saudi markets seem to have shrugged … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Conrad Sanderson continues an active release schedule for his wonderful Armadillo templated C++ library for linear algebra; release 1.1.8 just came out yesterday. So I made a new release 0.2.16 of RcppArmadillo, our Rcpp-based integration into R. No ... [Read more...]

According to respondents of the 2010 Rexer Analytics Data Miner Survey, open source R is the most commonly-used analysis tool amongst data miners: After a steady rise across the past few years, the open source data mining software R overtook other tools to become the tool used by more data miners (43%) ... [Read more...]

This post from Sherry LaMonica is the first in a series from members of the Revolution Analytics Engineering team — ed. Do you know about the big data capabilities in the RevoScaleR package, included with every Revolution R Enterprise installation? RevoScaleR provides a framework for fast and efficient multi-core processing of ... [Read more...]

We run an occasional series here on Revolutions called The R-Files, in which we profile members of the R community. Our intention with this series is to call out noteworthy work being done for open-source R and popular CRAN packages, and shine a light on some of the noteworthy individuals ... [Read more...]

TOMACS (ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation) is launching a call for paper submission. The special topic is Monte Carlo Methods in Statistics and Arnaud Doucet and myself are the special issue editors. Here are the details.: Over the last two decades Monte Carlo methods have attracted much attention ... [Read more...]

It is common to look at best time at the Marathon. Or perhaps the distribution of the top100, as done by John Myles White on his blog here (data can be found there), as the graph below, with the density of the time for the first 100 men (in blue) a... [Read more...]

A standard idea in extreme value theory (see e.g. here, in French unfortunately) is that to estimate the 99.5% quantile (say), we just need to estimate a quantile of level 95% for observations exceeding the 90% quantile. In extreme value theory,... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

Google today announced a Data Visualization Challenge that is well suited to the graphical capabilities of R. The goal is to visualize the US Federal budget from the point of view of the taxes an individual pays. The data are available from whatwepayfor.com -- their FAQ gives details about ... [Read more...]

read more [Read more...]

Faculty and students of Iowa State University Department of Statistics published online an analysis of the data on 2009 distributions of the US Stimulus funds, aka the Recovery And Reinvestment Act. (The analysis was published in March last year as part of the Design for America competition, but I only recently ... [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...]

[Read more...]

[Read more...]

There are situations where we might want to run R on a standalone machine so need to download a (potentially) large number of packages to install on this system. Rather than having to through the pain of searching through CRAN to find the packages and all the dependencies and manually ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

The doSMP package (and its companion package, revoIPC), previously bundled only with Revolution R, is now available on CRAN for use with open-source R under the GPL2 license. In short, doSMP makes it easy to do SMP parallel processing on a Windows box with multiple processors. (It works on Mac ... [Read more...]

A few days ago Conrad Sanderson released version 1.1.6 of his Armadillo templated C++ library for linear algebra. Accordingly, I made a new release 0.2.14 of RcppArmadillo, our Rcpp-based integration into R which included a few local fixes. However, ... [Read more...]

Recently on his blog (here), Robin mentioned an amazing book, called "A Million Random Digits" published by RAND corporation. The book was initially published in 1955, but RAND published a nice (and expensive) second edition. A great thing is that ... [Read more...]