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...]

Every year the UK’s general insurance actuarial community organises a big conference, which they call GIRO, short for General Insurance Research Organising committee. This year's conference is in Brussels from 18 - 21 September 2012. Despite the fac... [Read more...]

Today I feel very lucky, as I have been invited to the Royal Statistical Society conference to give a tutorial on interactive web graphs with R and googleVis. I prepared my slides with RStudio, knitr, pandoc and slidy, similar to my Cambridge R talk. ... [Read more...]

In this tutorial I am going to share my R&D and trading experience using the well-known from statistics Autoregressive Moving Average Model (ARMA). There is a lot written about these models, however, I strongly recommend Introductory Time Series with R, which I find is a perfect combination between light ... [Read more...]

Thank’s to Andrej who wrote this comment: “Is it possible to to color the resulting 12 clusters within your original image to get a feel for visual separation?” You can do so: But how to get values at a location? You will need these values to determine whether the defined ... [Read more...]

The main question when using remote sensed raster data, as we do, is the question of NaN-treatment. Many R functions are able to use an option like rm.NaN=TRUE to treat these missing values. In our case the kmeans function in R is not capable to use such a ... [Read more...]

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Disappeared for a while collecting frequent flyer points. In the process I ‘discovered’ that I live in the middle of nowhere, as it took me 36 hours to reach my conference destination (Estoril, Portugal) through Christchurch, Sydney, Bangkok, Dubai, Madrid … Continue reading → [Read more...]

In my last post I was explaining the usage of QGis to do a layerstack of a Landsat-scene. Due to the fact that further research and trying out resulted in frustration I decided to stick with a software I know well: R. So download the needed layers here and open ... [Read more...]

One of the shortcomings of regression (both linear and logistic) is that it doesn’t handle categorical variables with a very large number of possible values (for example, postal codes). You can get around this, of course, by going to another modeling technique, such as Naive Bayes; however, you lose ... [Read more...]

Lets go one with the second part of learning R by doing R (you will find the first part here. As we have used vectors, matrices and loops in the first part, we will concentrate on graphics in this one. but first we will need data to plot: Sometimes you ... [Read more...]

Geography is often about statistics as it is the basis for fast exchange of information: providing a mean and standard deviation to the audience is often much easier then showing raw data: Learning a script language for this purpose can be a hard-ass work. But I think it is more ... [Read more...]

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A primary problem data scientists face again and again is: how to properly adapt or treat variables so they are best possible components of a regression. Some analysts at this point delegate control to a shape choosing system like neural nets. I feel such a choice gives up far too ... [Read more...]

When I am working in new institutions and I am asking: “Do you have a document management system?” I often get the answer:”Yap, we are using folders” … OKAY. Making analysis, developing applications and keeping an eye on code, data and applications make this even harder as it has to ... [Read more...]

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If I would like to adjust a shape file I normally used the way over an excel file or a text file to get a table and to join this with an existing shape file. Due to the sp and rgdal packages in R you can manipulate shapefiles directly in ... [Read more...]

Most of us R users are using a special working directory for the daily work in R. But I was bothered in typing everytime in my command line prior using R. Also using this line at the first position in scripts was not pleasent enough. So how to get around ... [Read more...]

Hollywood movies are obsessed with outrunning explosions and outrunning crashing alien spaceships. For explosions the movies give the optimal (but unusable) solution: run straight away. For crashing alien spaceships they give the same advice, but in this case it is wrong. We demonstrate the correct angle to flee. Running from ... [Read more...]

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