We're having problem with starting values in glm(). A very simple logistic regression with just an intercept with a very simple starting value (beta=5) blows up.... [Read more...]

Matthew Yglesias shares this graph from the Economist: I hate this graph. OK, sure, I don't hate hate hate hate it: it's not a 3-d exploding pie chart or anything. It's not misleading, it's just extremely difficult to read. Basically,... [Read more...]

By popular demand, here's my R script for the time-use graphs:... [Read more...]

Matthew Yglesias discusses how West Virginia used to be a Democratic state but is now solidly Republican. I thought it would be helpful to expand this to look at trends since 1948 (rather than just 1988) and all 50 states... [Read more...]

The R language is definitely going mainstream:... [Read more...]

A couple people pointed me to this recent news article which discusses "why, beyond middle age, people get happier as they get older." Here's the story: When people start out on adult life, they are, on average, pretty cheerful. Things... ... [Read more...]

par (mar=c(3,3,2,1), mgp=c(2,.7,0), tck=-.01) Thank you.... [Read more...]

Jaidev Deshpande writes: The World Economic Forum recently posed a data visualization problem. The dataset is a survey of experts from the so called "Agenda Councils" of the WEF. Here are the details. The dataset primarily contains the experts... [Read more...]

After our recent discussion of semigraphic displays, Jay Ulfelder sent along a semigraphic table from his recent book. He notes, "When countries are the units of analysis, it's nice that you can use three-letter codes, so all the proper names.... [Read more...]

Our "arm" package in R requires Doug Bates's "lme4" which fits multilevel models. lme4 is currently having some problems on the Mac. But installation on the Mac can be done; it just takes a bit of work. I have two... [Read more...]

Mandelbrot on taxonomy (from 1955; the first publication about fractals that I know of): Searching for Mandelbrot on the blog led me to Akaike, who also recently passed away and also did interesting early work on self-similar stochastic proces... [Read more...]

After I spoke tonight at the NYC R meetup, John Myles White and Drew Conway told me about this competition they're administering for developing a recommendation system for R packages. They seem to have already done some work laying out... ... [Read more...]

Christian Robert posts these thoughts: I [Ross Ihaka] have been worried for some time that R isn't going to provide the base that we're going to need for statistical computation in the future. (It may well be that the future... [Read more...]

Cyrus writes: I [Cyrus] was teaching a class on multilevel modeling, and we were playing around with different method to fit a random effects logit model with 2 random intercepts---one corresponding to "family" and another corresponding to "co... [Read more...]

Some thoughts from Christian, including this bit: We need to consider separately 1. R's brilliant library 2. R's not-so-brilliant language and/or interpreter. I don't know that R's library is so brilliant as all that--if necessary, I don't thi... [Read more...]

John Kastellec, Jeff Lax, and Justin Phillips write: Do senators respond to the preferences of their states' median voters or only to the preferences of their co-partisans? We [Kastellec et al.] study responsiveness using roll call votes on te... [Read more...]

Details matter (at least, they do for me), but we don't yet have a systematic way of going back and forth between the structure of a graph, its details, and the underlying questions that motivate our visualizations. (Cleveland, Wilkinson, and.... [Read more...]

Patricia and I have cleaned up some of the R and Bugs code and collected the data for almost all the examples in ARM. See here for links to zip files with the code and data.... [Read more...]

Lluis Bermudez writes: I'm from University of Barcelona and I've using "arm" package to obtain posterior estimates of glm parameters. I usually worked with "glm" function, but I need more than a point estimation. The problem is that when using... [Read more...]

Jeroen Ooms writes: Here's a first version of a new web application for exploratory graphical analysis. It attempts to implement the layered graphics from the R package ggplot2 in a user-friendly way. This two-minute demo video demonstrates a ... [Read more...]