Like many people who crunch numbers frequently, I have increasingly been integrating Amazon’s cloud computing services into my daily workflow. In particular, I have been using their elastic cloud computing (EC2) on a regular basis. The service is an excellent way to offload computationally intensive work from your laptop ... [Read more...]

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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...]

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  My first experience with R was in 2007 as a sophomore in undergrad.  As part of a larger project on pricing day-ahead electricity futures, I wanted to cluster locational marginal price (LMP) data from the ISO-NE.  Something like k-means is easy … Continue reading → [Read more...]

  Let’s say that you want to take a set of documents and apply a computational linguistic technique.  If your method is based on the bag-of-words model, you probably need to pre-process these documents first by segmenting, tokenizing, stripping, stopwording, and … Continue reading → [Read more...]

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Julien Cornebise posted a rather detailed set of comments (from Jasper!) that I thought was interesting and thought-provoking enough (!) to promote to a guest post. Here it is , then, to keep the debate rolling (with my only censoring being the removal of smileys!). (Please keep in mind that I do ... [Read more...]

I have to say that it’s pretty exciting to watch your blog go from a few hits over its lifetime to getting almost 200 in a single day.  I am currently negotiating with Google over the purchase of this blog.  Or maybe not.  Again, thanks be to @revodavid for posting ... [Read more...]

I first encountered the R programming language a few years ago when I needed to make some plots. Although I’ve used it occasionally since, I always considered it a sort of “Perl for statisticians” — a useful swiss-army knife with … Continue reading → [Read more...]

There are a few ways to do this, but the only one that worked for me was to use Rserve and rconnect. In R, do this: 1 2 3 install.packages("Rserve") library(Rserve) Rserve(debug = FALSE, port=6311, args=NULL) Then you can connect in Python very easily. Here is a test in ... [Read more...]

Download "Getting Started with the Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit" (pdf, 1.25 megabytes) Download the Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit My Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit is about to move into private beta. What's in the release?... [Read more...]

For my talk on High Performance Computing in R (which I had to reschedule due to a nasty stomach bug), I used Wikipedia linking data, an adjacency list of articles and the articles to which they link. This data was linked from DataWrangling and was originally created by Henry Haselgrove. ... [Read more...]

Lately I have been using a lot of Python for signal processing and I quite like SciPy. However, I have been missing something like Sweave, which is great literate programming environment for R. Today I managed to look a bit more into it and found this hack on how to ... [Read more...]

Download "Getting Started with the Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit" (pdf, 1.25 megabytes) Download the Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit Thanks to Drew Conway (@drewconway), a PhD student at New York University, there are now eight excell... [Read more...]

Last night I was one of five speakers at the NYC R Statistical Programming Meetup. The topic last night was dubbed the R Rosetta Stone, and the intent was to show how R as a language translated into several other analytical platforms and programming languages. Other speakers covered MATLAB, SAS, ... [Read more...]

Every year, I single out what I think are the Top Five open source projects. This year, there's only one hold-over from previous years, and it's likely that I'm just going to give it a Lifetime Achievement Award and pick five others next year. 5. NetBe... [Read more...]

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