In computing, social networks are traditionally represented as graphs: a connection of nodes (people), pairs of which may be connected by edges (friend relationships). Visually, the social networks can then be represented like this: Social network analysis often amounts to calculating the statistics on a graph like this: the number ... [Read more...]

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  While Tsipras and his Syriza coalition have been busy in Greek parliament, the Internet has been a-buzz with speculation that their platform will result in a Greek exit from the Euro currency.  This prospect, affectionately dubbed “Grexit” by Citi… Read more › [Read more...]

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Another succeessful* year of R/Finance is behind us. It was certainly more: a larger crowd, a longer session, more seminars, more presentations, more sponsors – perhaps even to the point where we’ve reaching a certain capacity. What began as an interesting idea among a few friends has more than ... [Read more...]

In conjunction with Facebook's record-setting IPO last Thursday, the New York Times created an infographic to put the size of the offer in context with other recent IPOs. A detail of the graphic as it appeared in the print edition appears below: ChartsNThings gives a fascinating peek into the weeklong ... [Read more...]

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After years of saying that I was going to write a book to replace Makridakis, Wheelwright and Hyndman (1998), I’m finally ready to make an announcement! My new book is Forecasting: principles and practice, co-authored with George Athanasopoulos. It is available online and free-of-charge. We have written about 2/3 of the ... [Read more...]

As widely reported by CNN, the Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo, the sophistication of speeches by US politicians has declined in recent years, dropping from an 11th-grade level in 2005 to a 10th-grade level today. The reports are based on an analysis by the Sunlight Foundation, based on textual analysis of ... [Read more...]

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In my presentation about Seasonality Analysis and Pattern Matching at the R/Finance conference, I used examples that I have previously covered in my blog: Month of the Year Seasonality – I introduced the Seasonality charts in the Historical Seasonality Analysis: What company in DOW 30 is likely to do well in ... [Read more...]

If you want to get a quick numerical summary of a data set, the summary function gives a nice overview for data frames: __ require(ggplot2) Loading required package: ggplot2 __ data(diamonds) __ summary(diamonds) carat cut color clarity depth table Min. :0.2000 Fair : 1610 D: 6775 SI1 :13065 Min. :43.00 Min. :43.00 1st Qu.:0.4000 Good : 4906 E: 9797 VS2 :12258 1... [Read more...]

Almost my time for bed. Just write a quick solution on the second problem of Project Euler. Here it is. Each new term in the Fibonacci sequence is generated by adding the previous two terms. By starting with 1 and 2, … Continue reading → [Read more...]

  The NATO summit is currently being held in Chicago, and, as is typical for NATO or G# summits, the streets and tweets are full of dissent.  In the spirit of my past investigations of online dissent (#jan25, #25bahman, #12fev,… Read more › [Read more...]

Let’s say you’ve used my Python script to automate the download of a hashtag or search phrase from Twitter (in a Unicode safe way, unlike within R).  Now let’s say you want to visualize the number of tweets over time.  Easy… Read more › [Read more...]

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Quantifying the success of government policies is clearly important. Randomized control trials, like those conducted by drug companies, are often described as the ‘gold-standard’ for policy evaluation. Under these, a policy is implemented in/to one area/group (treatment), but not in/to another (control). The difference in outcomes between ... [Read more...]

This post is written by Julien Cornebise. Last week in Aachen was the 3rd Edition of the Bayes(Pharma) workshop. Its specificity: half-and-half industry/academic participants and speakers, all in Pharmaceutical statistics, with a great care to welcome newcomers to Bayes, so as to spread as much as possible the ... [Read more...]

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