Association Rule Learning (also called Association Rule Mining) is a common technique used to find associations between many variables. It is often used by grocery stores, retailers, and anyone with a large transactional databases. It’s the same way that Target knows your pregnant or when you’re buying an ... [Read more...]

I had a great time yesterday moderating the "R in Action" panel discussion at the DataWeek conference in San Francisco. Each of the panelists represented a company that is actively using R and/or Revolution R Enterprise. Here (from memory, since I couldn't take notes) are some the things they ... [Read more...]

Eric and I have been exchanging emails about potential analyses for the school data and he published a first draft model in Offsetting Behaviour. I have kept on doing mostly data exploration while we get a definitive full dataset, and … Continue reading → [Read more...]

The Minimum Correlation Algorithm is a heuristic method discovered by David Varadi. Below I will benchmark the execution speed of 2 versions of the Minimum Correlation Algorithm versus the traditional minimum variance optimization that relies on solving a quadratic programming problem. I have run the code above for n=10 (10 assets), n=100 (100 ... [Read more...]

I'm back from a very relaxing holiday in Australia. Many thanks to our guest bloggers for filling in over the last couple of weeks with some great information about R while I was away. If you missed any of the posts, be sure to check them out: Douglas McNair, "Population ... [Read more...]

The next Cologne R user group meeting is scheduled for 5 October 2012. All details and the agenda are available on the KölnRUG Meetup site. Please sign up if you would like to come along. Notes from the last Cologne R user group meeting are available ... [Read more...]

Transactions are a very useful tool when dealing with data mining.  It provides a way to mine itemsets or rules on datasets. In R the data must be in transactions form.  If the data is only available in a data.frame then to create (or coerce) the data frame to ... [Read more...]

Coursera offers a number of on-line courses, all available for free and taught by experts in their fields. Today, the course Computing for Data Analysis begins. Taught by Johns Hopkins Biostatistics professor (and co-author of the Simply Statistics blog) Roger Peng, the course will teach you how to program in ... [Read more...]

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I like the idea of having data on school performance, not to directly rank schools—hard, to say the least, at this stage—but because we can start having a look at the factors influencing test results. I imagine the opportunity in … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Today I want to follow up with the Minimum Correlation Algorithm Paper post and show how to incorporate the Minimum Correlation Algorithm into your portfolio construction work flow and also explain why I like the Minimum Correlation Algorithm. First, let’s load the ETF’s data set used in the ... [Read more...]

It’s been quite a while since my last post on Euler problems. Today a visitor post his solution to the second problem nicely, which encouraged me to keep solving these problems. Just for fun! 10! = 10 * 9 * … * 3 * 2 * 1 … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Another full day spent working with Jean-Michel Marin on the new edition of Bayesian Core (soon to be Bayesian Essentials with R!) and the remaining hierarchical Bayes chapter… I have reread and completed the regression and GLM chapters, sent to very friendly colleagues for a last round of comments. Now, ... [Read more...]

Power analysis is a very useful tool to estimate the statistical power from a study. It effectively allows a researcher to determine the needed sample size in order to obtained the required statistical power. Clients often ask (and rightfully so) what the sample size should be for a proposed project. ... [Read more...]

Over summer I was busy collaborating with David Varadi on the Minimum Correlation Algorithm paper. Today I want to share the results of our collaboration: Minimum Correlation Algorithm Paper Back Test reports Supporting R code The Minimum Correlation Algorithm is fast, robust, and easy to implement. Please add it to ... [Read more...]

As advertised on the ‘Og, the ISBA mailing list and now the birth certificate of BayesComp (!), MCMSki IV is taking place for sure in Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, January 6-8 2014. The webpage has been started, thanks to Merrill Liechty, and should grow with informations about the location, the hotels, registration, transportation, and of ... [Read more...]

Today's guest post comes from Revolution Analytics data scientist Luba Gloukhov — ed. As a big fan of R’s ever-expanding geospatial plotting capabilities, I jumped at the chance create a map using The Million Song Dataset (MSD). For each of the 10,000 songs in the million song subset containing non-missing latitudes & ... [Read more...]

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Today's guest post comes from Winston Chang, a software developer at RStudio — ed. When it comes to making figures in R, you can use any font you like, as long as it's Helvetica, Times, or Courier. Using other fonts that are installed on your computer can seem an impossible task, ... [Read more...]

Abstract Long-term daily precipitation records from the US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) are processed and summarized using R. Below is R code which examines the data from Livermore, CA, the closest available USHCN station to my present home ... [Read more...]