This is the 1000th post on the ‘Og! Here are the entries that have had above 1000 views (not viewers) so far: In{s}a(ne)!! 5,353 “simply start over and build something better” 4,345 Julien on R shortcomings 1,966 Sudoku via simulated annealing 1,762 Of black swans and bleak prospects 1,462 Do we need an ... [Read more...]

The Bayesian-Frequentist debate reflects two different attitudes to the process of doing science, both quite legitimate. Bayesian statistics is well-suited to individual researchers, or a research group, trying to use all the information at its disposal to make the quickest possible progress. In pursuing progress, Bayesians tend to be aggressive ... [Read more...]

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Free dating site OkCupid (which was recently acquired by match.com) collects a lot of data. With over 3 million members, many of whom have provided extensive information about their personal details including preferences, lifestyle, sexuality and hobbies via their dating profiles, they have a wealth of information upon which to ... [Read more...]

Warning message: This song contains highly suggestive coefficients and graphic depictions of exuberant R-core lovin’. “Plotting Ihaka” is based on Rotting Piñata by Sponge, and reflects a small measure of my boundless joy in the world of R. Despite being a firm proponent of muffins, I can confidently say ... [Read more...]

Sierra Trading Post mailed me their End-of-Winter 2011 catalog, which consists mostly of mid- to high-end sportswear products, but also things like snow skis, flashlights, and binoculars. STP sells closeouts, overstock, seconds, and items with cosmetic blemishes or irregularities. I spent an hour of relaxation time enumerating the various product brands ... [Read more...]

The paper “Exact sampling for intractable probability distributions via a Bernoulli factory” by James Flegal and Radu Herbei got posted on arXiv without me noticing, presumably because it came out just between Larry Brown’s conference in Philadelphia and my skiing vacations! I became aware of it only yesterday and ... [Read more...]

Nothing like a little Sunday morning data hacking before a big game!  I have been wanting to play with the NHL play-by-play event files for some time now.  The JSON datasets provide a wealth of information about each event in the game including the location, as defined by the fields ... [Read more...]

Valentine's day is a nice opportunity to post on hot and sexy topics... Well, it's also an important day that I should not miss, probably as much as Saint Patrick's my wife's birthday. And as I mentioned last week (here), it is difficult to get the... [Read more...]

[To all of the R-bloggers out there who recognize this, I apologize.  To those that don't, This is at least the 5th review of this book to go on the feed.  The author is linking to the others here.] Long Version: I have a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science.  ... [Read more...]

We have now received reports back from JCGS for our parallel MCMC paper and they all are very nice and supportive! The reviewers essentially all like the Rao-Blackwellisation concept we developed in the paper and ask for additions towards a more concrete feeling for the practical consequences of the method. ... [Read more...]

Like many academics, Arthur Charpentier thinks a lot about publishing papers in journals. Specifically, we wondered if there was a way to figure out which journal was the best place to publish his next paper and have it accepted: I was wondering if there were clusters of journals, i.e. ... [Read more...]

Another Sudoku-like puzzle from the weekend edition of Le Monde. The object it starts with is a 9×9 table where each entry is an integer and where neighbours take adjacent values. (Neighbours are defined as north, west, south and east of an entry.) The question is about whether or not it ... [Read more...]

Tiobe Software ranks the popularity of programming languages based on references in search engines. While the methodology might be debated in terms of the absolute rankings it produces, it is quite interesting to see how the rankings fluctuate over time: Tiobe has produced a monthly report of rankings based on ... [Read more...]

An ‘Og reader. Emmanuel Charpentier, sent me the following email about model choice: I read with great interest your critique of Peter Congdon’s 2006 paper (CSDA, 50(2):346-357) proposing a method of estimation of posterior model probabilities based on improper distributions for parameters not present in the model inder examination, as ... [Read more...]

It's great to see the growth in R user groups around the world, and now there are three new ones in western Europe: In Amsterdam, a new R user group has just formed, called amst-R-dam. They are just scheduling their first meeting now (vote here for a date) which will ... [Read more...]

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Admittedly I am not the best R coder, and I certainly have a lot to learn, but the code at the link below should provide you with an example of how easy it is to create a very (repeat: very) basic web crawler in R.  If you wanted to do ... [Read more...]

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If you're planning to go to R/Finance 2011[*] in Chicago (and if you're doing quantitative finance with R, you definitely should), time is running out to submit your abstract for contributed talks. The best part of R/Finance is learning about all the interesting ways R is used to analyze ... [Read more...]