New PDF slides version (presented at the Bay Area R Users Meetup October 13, 2009). We at Win-Vector LLC appear to like R a bit more than some of our, perhaps wiser, colleagues ( see: Choose your weapon: Matlab, R or something else? and R and data ). While we do like R (see: ... [Read more...]

This is tremendously cool. A nice intuitive web-based interface for the lme4 package in R (and you neither need to know R or understand the intricacies of the lme4 package) that gives you pdf output and plots. If you just want to play around and not worry about coding things ... [Read more...]

At this week's R clinic Frank Harrell will unveil the new rms (Regression Modeling Strategies) package that is a replacement for the R Design package.  He will demonstrate the differences with Design, especially related to enhanced graphics for displaying effects in regression models.  Frank will also discuss the implementation of ... [Read more...]

so these articles are ‘old news,’ but here i am to blog it down before i forget. First article is entitled “For Today’s Graduate, Just One Word – Statistics,” and the second article is entitled “Data Analysts Captivated by R’s Power.” It really does feel re-enforcing and motivating when ... [Read more...]

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For readers at Vanderbilt: At yesterday's R course I found out that Theresa Scott in the Biostatistics department holds a weekly R clinic and encourages new R users who want to learn more to bring any questions about R, or even your own code and data. The R clinic is ... [Read more...]

Pew Research has found that 79% of Americans believe in The Second Coming of Jesus. What worries me more is not that 4 out of 5 Americans believe in The Second Coming, but that 1 out of 5 believes it will happen in their lifetime. It seems inevitable t... [Read more...]

The New York Times published this interesting article on how the ability to design and perform computer simulations is a highly marketable skill for careers across many disciplines.In methodology development we use simulation nearly every day. We've developed our own specialized genetic data simulation software, genomeSIMLA, that's freely available ... [Read more...]

I've linked to UCLA's stat computing resources once before on a previous post about choosing the right analysis for the questions your asking and the data types you have. Here's another section of the same website that has code to run an identical analysis in all of these statistical packages, ... [Read more...]

My fellow bloggers John and Scott have posted recently about the free statistical programming language R.  How does it compare to an expensive language like SAS? If you’ve done any statistical analysis, then you’ll know that getting and cleaning the data is a major step in any project.  ... [Read more...]

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Last week I posted a short tutorial on how to merge datasets using R. R is a free and open-source statistical computing software and programming language (get R here). The only downside is a steeper learning curve because the documentation is sparse and often difficult to understand at first. Once ... [Read more...]

The Pew Research Center just published a piece reviewing their finding that people who are married report significantly greater levels of happiness than those who are unmarried. I always enjoy this result, particularly because of contemporary Western c... [Read more...]

The New York Times has a beautiful visualization of immigration trends in the United States since 1880. I highly recommend spending a few minutes playing with the interactive display. [Read more...]

This is why I love XKCD, though surely the best part of this strip was the mouseover: “correlation doesn’t imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing, ‘look over there’.” [Read more...]

We Americans have a reputation as being unworldly. Given the results of the most recent Pew survey, perhaps we deserve it. Evidently, the majority of us never move out of our home states. [Read more...]

Being a drummer, a programmer and a fan of statistical analysis, this post on the (unnaturally) perfect timing of drum parts recorded to a click track was a real delight to me. Of course, many claims in the post are odd: it seems hard to imagine that a... [Read more...]

I got an email, asking me if our arm package can simulate tobit model to get simulated parameters. Indeed, arm does not suport tobit model. It only support sim() for lm, glm and mer classes in R. But it is not difficult to get a tobit verison of sim(). Here ... [Read more...]

A recurrent source of irritation for me is the absence of a good default behavior in R for choosing the color scheme for bar plots. A stacked bar plot looks only as good as the color scheme you use. In hope of finding a usable scheme that I could settl... [Read more...]

ALL ABOUT REVOLUTION COMPUTING’S R DISTRIBUTION Decision Science News was intrigued by a company called REvolution Computing that got some attention of late for spinning their own mix of the R language for statistical computing and giving it away for free. So DSN asked to interview them to see ... [Read more...]