If the goal of the Invisible Children campaign, which has received millions of dollars of contributions since the Kony 2012 video went viral, is to convince us that the money is being put to humanitarian efforts, they could do a lot better than this chart: Putting 37% of expenses into programs in ... [Read more...]

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useR! 2012 is just around the corner. The deadline for talk and poster abstract submissions is today! Submit your abstract here. [Read more...]

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I was grading my Master projects this morning and came upon this graph: which compares the variability of an importance-sampling estimator versus its self-normalised alternative… This is an interesting case in that self-normalisation does considerably degrade the quality of the approximation in that setting. In other cases, self-normalisation may bring ... [Read more...]

In the last post I presented a function for recovering marginal effects of interaction terms. Here we implement the function with simulated data and plot the results using ggplot2.       #---Simulate Data and Fit a linear model with an... [Read more...]

R user Anthony Damico has created "Twotorials": a series of two-minute tutorials for newcomers to R. Topics include how to download and install R, how to do simple arithmetic in r, how to work with data tables in r and many others. The tutorials are especially useful for users of ... [Read more...]

A few friends have asked for self-study resources on learning (or brushing up on) basic statistics. I plan to keep updating this post as I find more good suggestions. Of course the ideal case is to have a good teacher … Continue reading → [Read more...]

The IBM Netezza analytics appliances combine high-capacity storage for Big Data with a massively-parallel processing platform for high-performance computing. With the addition of Revolution R Enterprise for IBM Netezza, you can use the power of the R language to build predictive models on Big Data. In the demonstration below, Revolution ... [Read more...]

By Yanchang zhao, RDataMining.com Building prediction/classification models is one of the most widely-seen data mining tasks in business applications. To share experience on building prediction models with R, I have started a discussion at RDataMining group on LinkedIn with the … Continue reading → [Read more...]

There has been some discussion about whether Google Scholar or one of the proprietary software companies numbers are better for citation counts. I personally think Google Scholar is better for a number of reasons: Higher numbers, but consistently/a... [Read more...]

It has been a strange last ten days since we unexpectedly entered grant writing mode. I was looking forward to work on this issue near the end of the year but a likely change on funding agency priorities requires applying … Continue reading → [Read more...]

In this article, I show you how to create a data.frame from a text submitted in a textarea field with FastRWeb. Requirements FastRWeb installed Knowledge of webforms ?read.table Experience in HTML5 Submit This example needs two scripts. The first one contains the webform. I wrote a FastRWeb script ... [Read more...]

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If I google for “probability distribution” I find the following extremely bad picture: It’s bad because it conflates ideas and oversimplifies how variable probability distributions can generally be. Most distributions are not unimodal. Most dist... [Read more...]

For the longest time I resisted customizing R for my particular environment. My philosophy has been that each R script for each separate analysis I do should be self contained such that I can rerun the script from top to bottom on any machine and get the same results. This ... [Read more...]

With 1.2 under our belts, we go now to the example in section 1.3 which was designed to show us how to partition a larger set of data into subsets for analysis. In this case, we’re going to jump to example 1.3.2 to determine the number of live births. While the Python ... [Read more...]

lembarrasduchoix asked: thank you for the introduction to Newcomb’s paradox! Could you do a post on your favorite paradoxes?    The decision theory paradoxes I’m familiar with are: Ellsberg Paradox— Theorists encode bothsituations with unknown... [Read more...]

Revolution Analytics' CEO Dave Rich was interviewed by Wikibon's David Vellante and SiliconAngle's John Furrier at the Strata 2012 conference last week. Given Dave's background at Accenture Analytics, the conversation naturally turned to impact of predictive analytics and R on business services. (See the video after the jump, below.) Bret Latmore ... [Read more...]

During the time I have used R the base graphics package has met my needs, although I have been aware of ggplot2 but found learning it a bit of a struggle so have pretty much ignored it until now. Most … Continue reading → [Read more...]