A question that often comes across various help lists is how to combine or split an output from an R graphics device. Maybe you have looped/combined multiple visuals into a single pdf to avoid cluttering your working directory and now … Continue reading → [Read more...]

The Barron’s article Still Too Pricey by Andrew Bary looks at the share price of the Facebook and based on the P/E ration valuation metrics concludes that even at the current prices, stock is overvalued. I want to show how to do this type of fundamental analysis using ... [Read more...]

As we noted last month, the new Themes feature in ggplot2 helps you customize the design of R charts to your liking. Now, R user Jeffrey Arnold has built on this feature to create standardized themes to make R graphics looks like those from major publications and other software systems. ... [Read more...]

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I have previously described and back-tested the Permanent Portfolio strategy based on the series of posts at the GestaltU blog. Today I want to show how we can improve the Permanent Portfolio strategy perfromance using following simple tools: Volatility targeting Risk allocation Tactical market filter First, let’s load the ... [Read more...]

The RHadoop project, the open-source project supported by Revolution Analytics to integrate R and Hadoop, continues to evolve. Now available is version 2 of the rmr package, which makes it possible for R programmers to write map-reduce tasks in the R language, and have them run within the Hadoop cluster. This ... [Read more...]

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Jeffrey Breen (the man behind the Twitter airline sentiment analysis example) recently posted a collection of slides with some great tips for accessing data from R. "Tapping the Data Deluge" includes information on: Using the XLConnect package to read data from Excel spreadsheets Using the foreign package to read SPSS, ... [Read more...]

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The next minor update to R — version 2.15.2 "Trick or Treat" — will be released on October 26, R-core member Peter Dalgaard announced today. You can find the planned updates in the current NEWS file (scroll down to the section 'CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.15.1 patched'; the changes at the top of the file ... [Read more...]

If connecting data to the real world is the next sexy job, then how do I do this? And how do I connect the real world to R? It can be done as Matt Shottwell showed with his home made ECG and a patched version of R at useR! 2011. However, ... [Read more...]

I have written a few posts discussing descriptive analyses of evaluation of National Standards for New Zealand primary schools.The data for roughly half of the schools was made available by the media, but the full version of the dataset is … Continue reading → [Read more...]

The Maker Movement has led to the production of open-source 3-D printers and other manufacturing machines that allow hobbyists to design, create and produce real-world objects affordably. Now R user Ian Walker, in a post at the Psychological Statistics blog, shows how to use the R language to transform 3-D ... [Read more...]

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As the term has progressed, my LSM2241 lectures are getting more consistent. I’m aiming to use 45 slides for what is officially a two hour lecture, although in reality it lasts about 90 minutes. We take a break at about 50 … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I recently came across the “An early Halloween for gold traders” article by Mark Hulbert. I have discussed this type of seasonality analysis in my presentation at R/Finance this year. It is very easy to run the seasonality analysis using the Systematic Investor Toolbox. This confirms that October have ... [Read more...]

As an open-source project, the R source code has always been available to download from the R-project website. You can find source code for the latest released version here, and for the changing-daily new version in progress (R-devel) here. But if you don't have the R sources handy, and just ... [Read more...]

Last month we shared an visualization showing the changing extent of Arctic sea-ice. This visualization by the multinational Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) switches the view to the Southern pole and takes the visualization to a whole new level, by animating it in 3-D: The ... [Read more...]

I want to show the example of calling the Minimum Correlation Algorithm from Excel. I will use RExcel to connect R and Excel and will create a small VBA cell array function to communicate between Excel and R. I have previously discussed the concept of connecting R and Excel in ... [Read more...]

Another day full of interesting and challenging—in the sense they generated new questions for me—talks at the SuSTain workshop. After another (dry and fast) run around the Downs; Leo Held started the talks with one of my favourite topics, namely the theory of g-priors in generalized linear models. ... [Read more...]