Zack Abrahamson, the "data whiz" at political analysis site Politico, is apparently an R user. Politico's Feb 10 2012 chart of the day clearly uses the ggplot2 graphics package and (quoting Politico) looks into the disenchanted slice of the GOP that’s not engaged with its party’s primary. And that slice ... [Read more...]

Many thanks to Hadley Wickham for his informative and entertaining webinar yesterday, "A backstage tour of ggplot2". Thanks also to everyone who submitted questions -- with more than 800 attendees live on the line we had many more questions than we had time to answer. For more ggplot2 information, Hadley kindly ... [Read more...]

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I recently began using the TwitteR package in R to examine my tweeting patterns. One of my first projects was to identify each of my Twitter followers, where they were located, how many tweets they had, and then plot their location on a map using a bubble which was related ... [Read more...]

After reading David Smith’s tweet on the price of Oracle R Enterprise (actually free, but it requires Oracle Data Mining at $23K/core as pointed out by Joshua Ulrich.) I went to Oracle’s site to see what was all about. Oracle … Continue reading → [Read more...]

The Dev Team at Revolution Analytics recently released an update to the Revolution R 5 family. Version 5.0.1 adds compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 for all editions (Community, Academic and Enterprise). This expands the platform support to Red Hat 5, Red Hat 6 and Microsoft Windows. For Revolution R Enterprise customers and users ... [Read more...]

Here’s a short example of calculating zero rates and discount factors from cash rates using futile.paradigm. Of note is how …Continue reading » [Read more...]

Next Thursday (Jan. 16), at the RSS, there will be a special half-day meeting (afternoon, starting at 13:30) on Recent Advances in Monte Carlo Methods organised by the General Application Section. The speakers are Richard Everitt, University of Oxford, Missing data, and what to do about it Anthony Lee, Warwick University, Auxiliary ... [Read more...]

This is an exciting release of futile.matrix, which in some ways the package grows up and finds its purpose. It …Continue reading » [Read more...]

Over the weekend, I have added a few slides referring to recent papers mentioning the convergence of ABC algorithms, in particular the very relevant paper by Dean et al. I had already discussed in an earlier post. (This is taking a larger chunk of my time than expected! I am ... [Read more...]

James Cheshire, R user and lecturer at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, created this map of the most trafficked cycle routes in London: Click to enlarge, it's a gorgeous chart. The bicycle traffic data comes from London's public cycle-hire facility, which currently is only available in central London (... [Read more...]

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Well this certainly took a while but the latest installment of my functional dispatching library for R is finally released …Continue reading » [Read more...]

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If you're a Twitter user like me, you're probably familiar with the way that conversations can easily by tracked by following the #hashtag that participants include in the tweets to label the topic. But what causes some topics to take off, and others to die on the vine? Does the ... [Read more...]

One factor that is critical for any financial planning is estimating what future inflation will be. For example, if you’re saving money in an instrument that gains 3% per year, and inflation is estimated to be 4% per year, well then you’re losing m... [Read more...]

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December and January were crazy months, with a lot of travel and suddenly I found myself in February working in four parallel projects involving quantitative genetics data analyses. (I’ll write about some of them very soon) Anyhow, as I have … Continue reading → [Read more...]

This is the second post in the series about Multiple Factor Models. I will build on the code presented in the prior post, Multiple Factor Model – Fundamental Data, and I will show how to build Fundamental factors described in the CSFB Alpha Factor Framework. For details of the CSFB Alpha ... [Read more...]

Erik Sigur, Information Technologist for the Department of Statistics and Probability at Michigan State University, writes at ReadWriteWeb about using Revolution R Enterprise to provide high-performance computation in R to the researchers in his department: Our search for a more effective version of R ultimately brought us to a product ... [Read more...]