Tom Louis Tom Louis is a professor of Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins and will be joining the Census Bureau through an interagency personnel agreement as the new associate director for research and methodology and chief scientist. Tom has an impressive history of … Continue reading → [Read more...]

In most data science applications, preparing the data is at least half the job. Finding where the data lives, figuring out how to access it, finding the right records, filtering, cleaning and transforming the data ... all of this has to be done before the statistical analysis can even begin. Fortunately, ... [Read more...]

Many public agencies release data in a fixed-format ASCII (FWF) format. But with the data all packed together without separators, you need a "data dictionary" defining the column widths (and metadata about the variables) to make sense of them. Unfortunately, many agencies make such information available only as a SAS ... [Read more...]

In a poster (PDF) presented at the UseR 2012 conference, FDA biostatistician Jae Brodsky reiterated the FDA policy regarding software used to prepare submissions for drug approvals with clinical trials: Sponsors may use R in their submissions. The FDA does not endorse or require any particular software to be used for ... [Read more...]

Following the announcement of the US Government Big Data Initiative, I was asked to write a small article about applications of R in government. The article has just appeared in Government Security News (and I believe will appear in their daily newsletter tomorrow). In the article, I highlighted several R ... [Read more...]

Thanks to the lower-than-usual snowfall over most of the US this past winter, there's low risk of major flooding as the snow melts this Spring (for the first time in four years!). Nonetheless, being able to forecast river flood events is of critical importance to local emergency managers, water & electric ... [Read more...]

After finishing the R prototype for data visualization, I've started abstracting the various methods necessary to create beautiful graphs. While there's no preliminary version of the R package yet, I think I've taken a number of exciting steps. These include: Abstracting graph objects. Objects such as lines, scatter plots, and ... [Read more...]