The design of the statistical programming language R sits in a slightly uncomfortable place between the functional programming and object oriented paradigms. The upside is you get a lot of the expressive power of both programming paradigms. A downside of this is: the not always useful variability of the language’... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

[Read more...]

[Read more...]

[Read more...]

I suspect I am not unique in not being able to remember how to control the point shapes in R. Part of this is a documentation problem: no package ever seems to write the shapes down. All packages just use the “usual set” that derives from S-Plus and was carried ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

[Read more...]

[Read more...]

A lot of people consider the static typing found in languages such as C, C++, ML, Java and Scala as needless hairshirtism. They consider the dynamic typing of languages like Lisp, Scheme, Perl, Ruby and Python as a critical advantage (ignoring other features of these languages and other efforts at ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

A commenter on this blog reminded me of one of the frustrating aspects faced by newbies, not only to R but to any other programming environment (I am thinking of typical students doing stats for the first time). The statement … Continue reading → [Read more...]

The important criterion for a graph is not simply how fast we can see a result; rather it is whether through the use of the graph we can see something that would have been harder to see otherwise or that could not have been seen at all. – William Cleveland, The ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

[Read more...]

[Read more...]

Programmers should definitely know how to use R. I don’t mean they should switch from their current language to R, but they should think of R as a handy tool during development.Again and again I find myself working with Java code like the following. td.linenos { background-color: #f0... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

One of the recurring frustrations in data analytics is that your data is never in the right shape. Worst case: you are not aware of this and every step you attempt is more expensive, less reliable and less informative than you would want. Best case: you notice this and have ... [Read more...]

This is a tutorial on how to try out a new package in R. The summary is: expect errors, search out errors and don’t start with the built in examples or real data. Suppose you want to try out a novel statistical technique? A good fraction of the time ... [Read more...]