Well, one election is over but it is never too soon to start another – or in this case revisit the past four years One day after the 2008 US Presidential election, there was a Rasmussen poll taken of 1000 likely voters asking for their choice for the 2012 Republican Presedential Candidate. The overwhelming ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from October of particular interest to R users. Sponsorships for local R user groups from Revolution Analytics are now open to applicants worldwide. During the landfall of Hurricane Sandy in the US, several R-based apps used public weather and social media ... [Read more...]

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Just had my supper. Stomach is full of stewed beef and potato.  I’d like to solve the 22nd Euler problem before tonight work (right, I’ll work late in my office). Using names.txt (right click and ‘Save Link/Target As…’), a 46K text file containing over … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I just sat in on the rehearsal for Thursday's webinar by John Deere's Derek Hoffman, Order Fulfillment Forecasting at John Deere: How R Facilitates Creativity and Flexibility. Derek will give a spirited argument of why R is critical for the faming equipment manufacturer's operations: from forecasting demand for equipment, forecasting ... [Read more...]

I recently came across the Optimal Rebalancing Strategy Using Dynamic Programming for Institutional Portfolios by W. Sun, A. Fan, L. Chen, T. Schouwenaars, M. Albota paper that examines the cost of different rebablancing methods. For example, one might use calendar rebalancing: i.e. rebalance every month / quarter / year. Or one ... [Read more...]

In response to last week's post on the rapidly increasing ideology of the US Republican Party, Mike Lawrence suggested another way of looking at the DW-NOMINATE ideology data. Rather than simply looking at boxplots of the congress scores by party over time, we could fit a smooth curve to get ... [Read more...]

Plotting large amounts of hourly atmospheric data body, td { font-family: sans-serif; background-color: white; font-size: 12px; margin: 8px; } tt, code, pre { font-family: 'DejaVu Sans Mono', 'Droid Sans Mono', 'Lucida Console',... [Read more...]

It’s been over one month since my last post on Euler problem 20, when  I was planning to post at least one on either Euler project or visualization. So I am four posts behind; I’ll try to catch up. Tonight, I’ll solve the 21st Euler … Continue reading → [Read more...]

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I had a great time presenting my new webinar yesterday, thanks to everyone who attended "The Rise of Data Science in the Age of Big Data Analytics" and especially those who submitted questions. Sorry I didn't have time to get to them all, but feel free to ask here in ... [Read more...]

From time-to-time creating a basic map of the United States or other parts of the world to complement some statistical analysis is useful to emphasize a point. The maps package in R provide a good way to produce these these maps.  These maps axes are based on latitude and longitude ... [Read more...]

The Washington Post has an interactive graphic showing the rate at which the US presidential candidates Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have visited the various states for campaign rallies and fundraisers. Here's how it looks today: You can clearly see the focus on key swing states like Florida and Ohio, ... [Read more...]

Here is the list of press reports and news about R Bits (A bog under The New York Times) R you ready for R? by Ashlee Vance Published: January 8, 2009, 1:52 PM The New York Times Data Analysts Captivated by R’s Power by Ashlee Vance Published: January 6, 2009  InfoWorld The BI battle ... [Read more...]

Regime Detection comes handy when you are trying to decide which strategy to deploy. For example there are periods (regimes) when Trend Following strategies work better and there are periods when Mean Reversion strategies work better. Today I want to show you one way to detect market Regimes. To detect ... [Read more...]

As the clean-up continues on the eastern seaboard, I wanted to follow up on Monday's post on tracking Hurricane Sandy with Open Data with a couple of other R-based data applications spawned by the storm. Josef Fruehwald created an R script to tap into local weather sensors to keep track ... [Read more...]

Tim Gasper (Product Manager at Big Data platform Infochimps) has an informative article at TechCrunch that provides an overview of five open-source technologies trending now for Big Data applications. They are: Storm and Kafka (for processing stream data) Drill and Dremel (for ad-hoc queries of big data) R (for data ... [Read more...]

  A short visit to ISU but and therefore a busy and proftable day! About ten appointments in Snedecor Hall after a nice morning run, a highly attended Zyskind Lecture, and many interesting discussions all over the day: e.g., I had a great time discussing using null recurrent Markov chains ... [Read more...]

As you know, we have a thing for statistical literacy here at Simply Stats. So of course this column over at Politico got our attention (via Chris V. and others). The column is an attack on Nate Silver, who has a blog where he tries to predict the outc... [Read more...]

Hurricane Sandy is shaping up to be a major, and very dangerous, meteorological event for the US's East coast. Naturally, everyone is looking for the latest information and forecasts. Fortunately, the wealth of public meteorological data available on the open web, combined with real-time on-the-ground updates via social media, means ... [Read more...]