Leipzig R Statistical Computing is the sixth local R user group in Germany, and has been holding meetings since February. In the next meeting on July 12, member Claudia Beleites will talk about her pacakges softclassval (for classifier performance measures) and hyperspec (for hyperspectral data). meetup.com: Leipzig R Statistical Computing [Read more...]

Springer has introduced a new open, peer-reviewed journal focused on Data Science: EPJ Data Science. What makes this a Data Science journal is novel uses of statistics, data analysis, computer techniques and public data sources to research a topic in another domain, rather than methodological research. Here are a few ... [Read more...]

It's Independence Day in the U.S., so I am taking the day off, but I received the following request for advice and thought I'd pass it along to my readers. I wonder if you could help – I am trying to create 9 different coefficient plots , which repr... [Read more...]

In the prior post, Factor Attribution 2, I have shown how Factor Attribution can be applied to decompose fund’s returns in to Market, Capitalization, and Value factors, the “three-factor model” of Fama and French. Today, I want to show you a different application of Factor Attribution. First, let’s run ... [Read more...]

News is starting to leak that the Large Hadron Collider may have accomplished its primary mission of confirming the existence of the hypothesised and heretofore elusive subatomic particle, the Higgs Boson. And sure, billions of Euros worth of state-of-the-art high-energy machinery and an army of experimental and theoretical physicists probably ... [Read more...]

I recently posted about coefficient plots, discussing my approach and providing some example R code to create the graphs. I had the good fortune of hearing Amanda Driscoll give a talk recently, and she made a small, but really nice … Continue rea... [Read more...]

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R is an incredibly comprehensive statistics package. Even if you just look at the standard R distribution (the base and recommended packages), R can do pretty much everything you need for data manipulation, visualization, and statistical analysis. And for everything else, there's more than 5000 packages on CRAN and other repositories, ... [Read more...]

Following the crash of my hard drive right before leaving Kyoto, I bought a cheap Compaq Presario CQ57 to reinstall Ubuntu 12.04 over the weekend (and have a laptop available before leaving for Australia…)  It took about one hour to install from the DVD and everything seems to be working out ... [Read more...]

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It’s been a while since I solved one Euler problem last time. Has been busy. Now I’m back and continue to solve the next problem, which is to find the maximum. Let’s take a look at the 11th problem: What … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Due to my work with a multitude of statistical packages in my career I may be able to evaluate a lot of them. I’ve first used Excel for my calculations as most of the normal users do. I like the idea behind a spreadsheet and the combination of data ... [Read more...]

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A primary problem data scientists face again and again is: how to properly adapt or treat variables so they are best possible components of a regression. Some analysts at this point delegate control to a shape choosing system like neural nets. I feel such a choice gives up far too ... [Read more...]

One popular trend in presenting results is the "coefficient plot," an alternative to the table of regression coefficients. I am seeing this a little more often in political science research and have received a few requests for code, so I … Contin... [Read more...]

I’ve been playing with the igraph package a bit lately (see previous post HERE) and wanted to approach a problem I once visited in the past. The basic gist of the problem is this: Students in a class are asked … Continue reading → [Read more...]

It’s Saturday midnight and I’m already sleepy. However, after several hours, I finally got this google geographic map embedded in my post. Aha!!! This is about 20 finalists from the 9th season of So You Think You Can Dance. I count the states … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I am in the slow process of developing a package to bridge structured text formats (i.e. classroom transcripts)  with the tons of great R packages that visualize and analyze quantitative data (If you care to play with a rough build … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Wanting to start a family the natural way? For a healthy 45-year-old woman, you may be in for a five-year wait. That's the conclusion of Richie Cotton, a UK-based data scientist, who discovered when he and his girlfriend wanted to start a family that statistics on how long it takes ... [Read more...]

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