On his recent tour to the Bay Area, Hadley Wickham have two interesting R-related talks, for which video has been made available by Google Tech Talks. At the June Bay Area R User Group meeting, Hadley spoke on the future of interactive data visualization in R. Building on his experiences ... [Read more...]

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I am down to the last strokes of creating a package for downloading, importing and analyzing GHCN (Global Historical Climate Network0 Version 3.  There  were a few things holding me up, but  I’ve manged to handle all of them except the last one.  Let’s spend a little time looking ... [Read more...]

Mark Girolami sent me this announcement for six PhD studentships in Statistical Methodology and Its Application at University College London (UCL) that are great opportunities for anyone interested in computational statistics! The studentships are attached to the Department of Statistical Science at University College London, and a subset of them ... [Read more...]

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Yesterday Brett Goldstein, the Chief Data Officer for the City of Chicago, announced on Twitter the release of Chicago’s crime data for the past year. The data is very detailed, and wonderful resource for criminologist and social scientists alike. I have been playing around with the data a bit, ... [Read more...]

In a thoughtful blog post, Bioinformatician Ewan Birney (Head of Nucleotide Data at the European Bioinformatics Institute) talks about the importance of Statistics to biologists: Biology is really about stats. Indeed, the foundation of much of frequentist statistics - RA Fisher and colleagues - were totally motivated by biological problems. ... [Read more...]

The Knowledge Blog progect is a new, light-weight way of publishing scientific, academic and technical knowledge on the web, across several scientific disciplines. One such discipline is bioinformatics, and the Bioinformatics Knowledgeblog contains useful scientific reference material for bioinformatics, including several resources for R users. There you'll find an R ... [Read more...]

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It was proposed by Christian Goldbach that every odd composite number can be written as the sum of a prime and twice a square. 9 = 7 + 212 15 = 7 + 222 Read More: 461 Words Totally [Read more...]

It’s been a long journey and there are some people to thank for helping me along the way. Steve McIntyre, Ron Broberg, Jeff Id, Ryan ODonnell, RomanM, Nick Stokes, Robert Hijmans, Gabor  Grothendieck, Hadley Wickham, David Winsemius, and countless others on the R Help list. The Package is done. ... [Read more...]

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The Parco Nazionale Gran Paradiso and the Università di Pavia are organising a summer school on “Advances in species distribution modelling in ecological studies and conservation” in Pavia and Cogne, 12-18 September 2011. This school includes R and Winbugs tutorials, regular classes, plus a field trip to the park, so this ... [Read more...]

This is one of my favourites: in 1840 the German mathematician Dirichlet proved an elegant theorem, known as “Dirichlet’s approximation theorem“. The proof is surprisingly simple, but the usefulness of the proposition in some fields of mathematics, such as Diophantine analysis is remarkable. It goes as follows: Let a be ... [Read more...]

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If returns had infinite variance, would there be a problem bootstrapping information ratios? Background There is a discussion on the Quant Finance group of LinkedIn with the title: “How do you measure the confidence intervals of performance ratios?” One suggestion was to use the statistical bootstrap. This resulted in a ... [Read more...]

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The Satellite Application Facility on Climate Monitoring (CMSAF) generates, archives and distributes widely recognised high-quality satellite-derived products and services relevant for climate monitoring in operational mode. The data is freely accesible here after a registration process. I have ask them for several files with monthly averages of global solar radiation ... [Read more...]

In this post, Revolution engineer Sherry LaMonica shows us how to use the RevoScaleR big-data package in Revolution R Enterprise to do principal components analysis on 50 years of stock market data -- ed. Principal components analysis, or PCA, seeks to find a set of orthogonal axes such that the first ... [Read more...]