Learning R Montreal R Users Group See the general information page for workshop goals, format, what to expect, and what you need. You can reserve your spot by signing-up to the Montreal R User Group and registering for the workshops you are interested in. The workshops are free to attend (!) We are now supported by: We can be found on Statistics for a changing world: Google Public Data Explorer in Labs Last year, we released a public data search feature that enables people to quickly find useful statistics in search. More recently, we expanded this service to include information from the World Bank, such as population data for every region in the world. More and more public agencies, non-profits and other organizations are looking for ways to open up their data and expand global access to this kind of information. We want to help keep that momentum going, so today we're sharing a snapshot of some of the most popular public data search topics on Google. Popular public data topics on GoogleWe know people want to be able to find reliable data and statistics on a variety of subjects. You can read the complete list at this link (PDF), but here's the top 20 to get you started: You'll notice some interesting entries in the list. This chart compares life expectancy and the number of births per woman over the last 47 years for most economies of the world.
Romain Francois, Professional R Enthusiast Amateur Mapmaking: Getting Started With Shapefiles One of the great things about (software) code is that people build on it and out from it… Which means that as well as producing ever more complex bits of software, tools also get produced over time that make it easier to do things that were once hard to do, or required expensive commercial software tools. Producing maps is a fine example of this. Not so very long ago, producing your own annotated maps was a hard thing to do. Then in June, 2005, or so, the Google Maps API came along and suddenly you could create your own maps (or at least, put markers on to a map if you had latitude and longitude co-ordinates available). Since then, things have just got easier. Sometimes, though, when using maps to visualise numerical data sets, just putting markers onto a map, even when they are symbols sized proportionally in accordance with your data, doesn’t quite achieve the effect you want. But what do you do if the boundaries/shapes you want to plot aren’t supported by the OS API?
Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science Rattle: A Graphical User Interface for Data Mining using R Social Science Statistics Blog 28 April 2013 App Stats: Roberts, Stewart, and Tingley on "Topic models for open ended survey responses with applications to experiments" We hope you can join us this Wednesday, May 1, 2013 for the Applied Statistics Workshop. Molly Roberts, Brandon Stewart, and Dustin Tingley, all from the Department of Government at Harvard University, will give a presentation entitled "Topic models for open ended survey responses with applications to experiments". A light lunch will be served at 12 pm and the talk will begin at 12.15. "Topic models for open ended survey responses with applications to experiments" Molly Roberts, Brandon Stewart, and Dustin Tingley Government Department, Harvard University CGIS K354 (1737 Cambridge St.) Abstract: Despite broad use of surveys and survey experiments by political science, the vast majority of survey analysis deals with responses to options along a scale or from pre-established categories. Posted by Konstantin Kashin at 11:25 PM | Comments (2) 22 April 2013
StatsRUs Paul E. Johnson <pauljohn @ ku.edu> The original Rtips started in 1999. It became difficult to update because of limitations in the software with which it was created. Now I know more about R, and have decided to wade in again. In January, 2012, I took the FaqManager HTML output and converted it to LaTeX with the excellent open source program pandoc, and from there I’ve been editing and updating it in LyX. You are reading the New Thing! The first chore is to cut out the old useless stuff that was no good to start with, correct mistakes in translation (the quotation mark translations are particularly dangerous, but also there is trouble with ~, $, and -. (I thought it was cute to call this “StatsRus” but the Toystore’s lawyer called and, well, you know…) If you need a tip sheet for R, here it is. This is not a substitute for R documentation, just a list of things I had trouble remembering when switching from SAS to R. Heed the words of Brian D. 1.1 Bring raw numbers into R (05/22/2012) Step 1.
RStudio in the cloud, for dummies You can have your own cloud computing version of R, complete with RStudio. Why should you? It's cool! Plus, there's a lot more power out there than you can easily get on your own hardware. And, it's R in a web page. This entry is largely made possible by the work of Louis Alsett, who's completing his doctoral work at Trinity College, University of Dublin. Start-up1. 2. 3. a. 1) click "Create a New Security Group". 2) Give a name (like "RStudio") and 3) a description ("RStudio")-- both are required. g. Use4. 5. 6. 7. There's your R in the cloud! ManagementOur understanding of the "Free Usage Tier" is that you can leave this on all the time for a year without incurring any charges. However, there is also a "stopped" state. As long as an instance is running, you retain all aspects of your session-- it's just as if you had a computer that you left on running RStudio all the time. Happy cloud computing! * The free usage is limited to "micro" instances, such as we use here.
knitr: Elegant, flexible and fast dynamic report generation with R | knitr Overview The knitr package was designed to be a transparent engine for dynamic report generation with R, solve some long-standing problems in Sweave, and combine features in other add-on packages into one package (knitr ≈ Sweave + cacheSweave + pgfSweave + weaver + animation::saveLatex + R2HTML::RweaveHTML + highlight::HighlightWeaveLatex + 0.2 * brew + 0.1 * SweaveListingUtils + more). This package is developed on GitHub; for installation instructions and FAQ's, see README. Motivation One of the difficulties with extending Sweave is we have to copy a large amount of code from the utils package (the file SweaveDrivers.R has more than 700 lines of R code), and this is what the two packages mentioned above have done. Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to humans what we want the computer to do. -- Donald E. Features Acknowledgements Misc
The Endeavour — The blog of John D. Cook I help people make decisions in the face of uncertainty. Sounds interesting. I’m a data scientist. I study machine learning. I’m into big data. Even though each of these descriptions makes a different impression, they’re all essentially the same thing. There are distinctions. “Decision-making under uncertainty” emphasizes that you never have complete data, and yet you need to make decisions anyway. “Data science” stresses that there is more to the process of making inferences than what falls under the traditional heading of “statistics.” Despite the hype around the term data science, it’s growing on me. Machine learning, like decision theory, emphasizes the ultimate goal of doing something with data rather than creating an accurate model of the process that generates the data. “Big data” is a big can of worms. The term “statistics” literally means the mathematics of the interests of states, as in governments, because these were the first applications of statistics.
Romain Francois, Professional R Enthusiast Sunday, March 24 2013 Moving By romain francois on Sunday, March 24 2013, 16:52 This blog is moving to blog.r-enthusiasts.com. The new one is powered by wordpress and gets a subdomain of r-enthusiasts.com. See you there no trackback Monday, February 18 2013 Improving the graph gallery By romain francois on Monday, February 18 2013, 08:37 I'm trying to make improvements to the R Graph Gallery, I'm looking for suggestions from users of the website. I've started a question on the website's facebook page. no trackback Monday, February 4 2013 bibtex 0.3-5 By romain francois on Monday, February 4 2013, 11:59 - bibtex The version 0.3-5 of the bibtex package is on CRAN. no trackback Monday, November 5 2012 OOP with Rcpp modules By romain francois on Monday, November 5 2012, 16:24 - Rcpp The purpose of Rcpp modules has always been to make it easy to expose C++ functions and classes to R. The classes might look like this: And we can expose these classes to R using the following module declarative code: no trackback