If you haven’t yet discovered the competitive machine learning site kaggle.com, please do so now. I’ll wait. Great – so, you checked it out, fell in love and have made it back. I recently downloaded the data for the getting started competition. It consists of 42000 labelled images (28×28) of ... [Read more...]

In which Mo Farah et al show James that he's got a nasty heel-strike [Read more...]

In his 2004 paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Steven Peck argues: Simulation models can be used to mimic complex systems, but unlike nature, can be manipulated in ways that would be impossible, too costly or unethical to do in natural systems. Simulation can add to theory development and testing, ... [Read more...]

In London Olympics 2012 Medal Tables At A Glance? I posted some treemap visualisations of the Olympics medal tables generated using a Google Visualisation Chart treemap component. I thought it might be worth posting a quick R generated example too, using the off-the-shelf/straight out of CRAN treemap component. (If you ... [Read more...]

I spent most of today, err, yesterday, failing to hold back the tears as the medal performances from the Team GB Olympians kept rolling in… So to celebrate one of those wonderful performances, here are a couple of quick sketches of how Jessica Ennis made her medal in the Heptathlon. (... [Read more...]

In my morning attempt to read the whole internet before beginning work, I came across a program on the BBC website which allows you to see which Olympic athletes are your body doubles. Or rather, which athletes share your height and weight, and therefore your body mass index. Being a ... [Read more...]

It’s all very well publishing a research paper that describes the method for, and results of, analysing a dataset in a particular way, or a news story that contains a visualisation of an open dataset, but how can you do so transparently and reproducibly? Wouldn’t it be handy ... [Read more...]

Chaos. Hectic, seemingly unpredictable, complex dynamics. In a word: fun. I usually stick to the warm and fuzzy world of stochasticity and probability distributions, but this post will be (almost) entirely devoid of randomness. While chaotic dynamics are entirely deterministic, their sensitivity to initial conditions can trick the observer into ... [Read more...]

The code is horrible and the visualisations quite possibly misleading, but I’m dead tired and there are a couple of tricks in the following R code that I want to remember, so here’s a contrived bit of fumbling with some data of the form: enjoyCompany tooMuchFamily 1 strongly agree ... [Read more...]

Earlier this year I doodled a recipe for comparing the folk commonly followed by users of a couple of BBC programme hashtags (Social Media Interest Maps of Newsnight and BBCQT Twitterers). Prompted in part by a tweet from Michael Smethurst/@fantasticlife about generating an ESP map for UK politicians (something ... [Read more...]

Once again, I (re)discovered last week at the Rmetrics conference that old toolds can be extremely interesting to illustrate complex ideas, like uncertainty in fnancial markets, and stock prices. For instance a 99.5% quantile: we look for the scena... [Read more...]

I will be giving a short course in Switzerland next week, at the 6th R/Rmetrics Meielisalp Workshop & Summer School on Computational Finance and Financial Engineering organized by ETH Zürich, https://www.rmetrics.org/. The long... [Read more...]

Thursday, June 28th, 2012  19h. [Read more...]

10 days ago, a study published on http://www.annalsofepidemiology.org/ mentioned that "Death has a preference for birthdays" (as claimed in the title). The conclusion of the paper is that, in general, birthdays do not evoke a postponement mechanism... [Read more...]

Last week, @3wen (Ewen) helped me to write nice R functions to extract tweets in R and build datasets containing a lot of information. I've tried a couple of time on my own. Once on tweet contents, but it was not convincing and once on the activit... [Read more...]

Why settle for just one realisation of this year’s UEFA Euro when you can let the tournament play out 10,000 times in silico? Since I already had some code lying around from my submission to the Kaggle hosted 2010 Take on the Quants challenge, I figured I’d recycle it for ... [Read more...]

Many of you have heard about RStudio’s latest release and it’s new R Markdown feature. Today, I’d like to announce the markdown package for R, a tool for converting Markdown documents to HTML, created in collaboration with RStudio. It... [Read more...]

In this video tutorial, it will show you how to make R analysis Modules just like MS Excel Templates using the Building Derivative Calculator app as study case. Let’s say we wanted to know the derivative of tan(x^2 + 3), commonly, we will use th... [Read more...]

I wanted to get these releases out the door before the useR conference, especially since I’m giving a tutorial on Rook! There were two bugs found in Rook, not by me, but by users! This is a fantastic step in the right direction as it’s an ... [Read more...]

Browsing commandlinefu.com today, I came across this little one-liner to display which commands I use most often. Here’s what I got: Yep, seems legit. I navigate and look at files a whole bunch (ls, cd, cat), and I do a butt tonne of editing (vim). I sudo like ... [Read more...]