I recently posted an article on how to collate Wikipedia page views As there is a time component to this, it seemed appropriate to use the googleVis Package to visualize changes in page hits in the Google Motion chart For this exercise, I ran the wikiFun function covered in the ... [Read more...]

As the entire East Coast gets soaked by Hurricane Sandy, I can’t help but think that this is the perfect time to…take a course online! Well, as long as you have electricity, that is. I live in a heavily tree-lined area and so it’s onl... [Read more...]

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The little half puzzle proposed a “dumb’ solution in that players play a minimax strategy. There are 34 starting values less than 100 guaranteeing a sure win to dumb players. If instead the players maximise their choice at each step, the R code looks like this: and there are now 66 (=100-34, indeed!) ... [Read more...]

I found this Le Monde puzzle of June 16 I had stored and then somehow forgotten with my trips to Japan and Australia: There are n beans in a box, with 98≤n≤102). Two players take at each round either one bean from the box or “the little half” (i.e. the ... [Read more...]

As promised, the source distribution for R 2.15.2 is now available for download from the master CRAN repository. (Binary distributions for Windows, MacOS and Linux will be available from the CRAN mirror network in the coming days.) This latest point-update — codenamed "Trick or Treat" — improves the performance of the R engine ... [Read more...]

I first read about the Couch Potato strategy in the MoneySense magazine. I liked this simple strategy because it was easy to understand and easy to manage. The Couch Potato strategy is similar to the Permanent Portfolio strategy that I have analyzed previously. The Couch Potato strategy invests money in ... [Read more...]

At the Strata conference in New York today, Steve Yun (Principal Predictive Modeler at Allstate's Research and Planning Center) described the various ways he tackled the problem of fitting a generalized linear model to 150M records of insurance data. He evaluated several approaches: Proc GENMOD in SAS Installing a Hadoop ... [Read more...]

No the title doesn’t refer to how Katy Perry suffered at another of Jimmy Savile’s sexual predelictions, although these are two of  the participants. I’ll get to the details later Just over a year ago, I reflected on the relative wiki searches of leading female singing celebrities, ... [Read more...]

The O'Reilly Strata conferences are always great fun to attend, and this latest installment in New York City is no exception. This one is super-busy though; the conference has been sold out for weeks -- and not just marketing-sold-out, it's fire-department-sold out. It's non-stop conversations and presentations, and it's tough ... [Read more...]

On Thursday next week (November 1), I'll be giving a new webinar on the topic of Big Data, Data Science and R. Titled "The Rise of Data Science in the Age of Big Data Analytics: Why Data Distillation and Machine Learning Aren’t Enough", this is a provocative look at why ... [Read more...]

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There are new local R user groups in eight (!) countries to announce this month: Sweden is host to the first R user group in Scandinavia. StockholmR has been holding meetings since September, and their next meeting on November 28 will be on Teaching R and Data visualization using R. In Taiwan, ... [Read more...]

There’s a good FAQ on how to do the MongoDB query -__ R data frame but I wanted to post a more complete example that included the database connection and query setup since I suspect there are folks new to Mongo who would appreciate the end-to-end view. The code ... [Read more...]

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We all know that politicians can play it a little fast and loose with the truth. This is particularly true in debates, where politicians have to think on their feet and respond to questions from the audience or from each other.  Usually, we find out a... [Read more...]

Timelines can be quite a handy way of getting an overview of a player’s career in terms of when they played, with which team and who were their contemporaries As often is the case, I turned to Stackoverflow to set me on my way for an R solution. In ... [Read more...]

On October 14, the weekend edition of Le Monde had the following puzzle: consider four boxes that contain all integers between 1 and 9999, in such a way that for any N, N, 2N, 3N, and 4N are in four different boxes. If 1,2,3 and 4 are in boxes labelled 1,2,3 and 4, respectively, in [...] [Read more...]

The population of the world has been over 7 billion for about a year now. But those seven billion aren't distributed equally around the globe. 1.2 billion people — about in India alone (despite it havingjust 2% of the world's land area). At the other end of the spectrum, the entire continent of Australia ... [Read more...]

Today I want to show a simple example of how we can value a company using Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) analysis. The idea is to compute the company’s Intrinsic Value based on the discounted future cash-flows. To compute future cash-flows I will use the historical Free Cash Flow growth ... [Read more...]