I know, I know, I have been kinda lame about posting here lately. But that’s because my posting muscle has been focused on the new analyses for what makes a succesful #SciFund proposal. I’ve been posting them at the #SciFund blog under the Analysis tag – so check it ... [Read more...]

I’m preparing “R101,” an introductory workshop on the statistical software R. Perhaps other beginners might find some use in the following summary and resources. (See also the post on resources for teaching yourself introductory statistics.) Do you have obligatory screenshots … Continue reading → [Read more...]

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Nico brought to my attention the 130/30: The New Long-Only (2008) by A. Lo, P. Patel paper in his comment to the Multiple Factor Model – Building CSFB Factors post. This paper presents a very detailed step by step guide to building 130/30 Index using average CSFB Factors as the alpha model and MSCI ... [Read more...]

When I fit models with interactions, I often want to recover not only the interaction effect but also the marginal effect (the main effect + the interaction) and of course the standard errors. There are a couple of ways to do this in R but I ended writ... [Read more...]

Three new local R user groups to add to the list today: from Lithuania, Taiwan, and Birmingham (UK). The Chinese Academy of R Software (CARS) serves R users in Taipei (Taiwan). It has been approved by the Ministry of the Interior of Taiwan, and has more than 500 "likes" on its ... [Read more...]

In a free webinar tomorrow at 10AM Pacific, Professor of Finance Dr Sanjiv Das will present, "Using R for Analyzing Loans, Portfolios and Risk: From Academic Theory to Financial Practice". I saw a version of Dr Das's talk a couple of months ago at the Bay Area R User Group ... [Read more...]

Dr. Patrick Burns is the founder of Burns Statistics, providing consulting and bespoke software specializing in quantitative finance, programming in the S language, and optimization via genetic algorithms and simulated annealing. Patrick has written m... [Read more...]

A new package OpenStreetMap has been released to CRAN this week which is designed to allow you to easily add satellite imagery, or open street maps to your plots. Raster maps are a great way to add context to your spatial data with a minimum outlay of effort. The syntax ... [Read more...]

ThinkStats (by Allen B. Downey) is a good book to get you familiar with statistics (and even Python, if you’ve done some scripting in other languages). I thought it would be interesting to present some of the examples & exercises in the book in R. Why? Well, once you’ve ... [Read more...]

It has been a wonderful week in Roma, a mix of pleasant work and enjoyable free-time! I gave the ABC advanced course for the second time in a month so it did not require much in terms of preparation and there was a good sized audience with attentive (if too ... [Read more...]

For those who have not read the seminal works of Tufte and Cleveland, please hang your heads in shame. To salvage some sense of self-worth, you can then head over to Solomon Messing’s blog where he is starting a series on data visualization based on ... [Read more...]

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Spurious Regression problem dates back to Yule (1926): “Why Do We Sometimes Get Nonsense Correlations between Time-series?”. Lets see what is the problem, and how can we fix it. I am using Morgan Stanley (MS) symbol for illustration, pre-crisis time … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Hadley Wickham has just released an update to the ggplot2 graphics package for R. Version 0.9.0 significantly speeds up the process of rendering graphics, and the documentation is much improved (including the addition of many new examples). This update also adds a bunch of new features, which are documented in this 40... [Read more...]

Here are the R codes of the second R lab organised by Serena Arima in supplement of my lectures (now completed!). This morning I covered ABC model choice and the following example is the benchmark used in the course (and in the paper) about the impact of summary statistics. (Warning! ... [Read more...]

Much of the data that the analyst uses exhibits extraordinary range. For example: incomes, company sizes, popularity of books and any “winner takes all process”; (see: Living in A Lognormal World). Tukey recommended the logarithm as an important “stabilizing transform” (a transform that brings data into a more usable form ... [Read more...]

This is the first post of a series that describes how to download and parse specific data sets into R. These kinds of scripts can be functionalized further, but I doubt that these will ever find their way into a formal package. They are intended to be helpful to those ... [Read more...]

In the previous post I shared an example how to get high frequency data from IB broker (well, it is retail version of HFD – it has only best bid/ask and the trades). Now, once you saved some data – what should you do next? Next logical step would be data ... [Read more...]

Ben Goldacre, the physician and biostatistician behind the always-excellent Bad Science column in the Guardian, gave a barnburner of a talk at Strata 2012 yesterday, "The Information Architecture of Medicine is Broken". For anyone not aware of the problems caused by publication bias in clinical trials (for example, ineffective drugs with ... [Read more...]