Publications by Bogumił Kamiński

Missing tikzDevice

30.04.2013

I love using tikzDevice. When preparing LaTeX documents I switched to prepare all graphs in GNU R and then port them to TeX using tikzDevice. Recently I have moved to GNU R 3.0.0 and was shocked to find that this package is no longer available on CRAN.Fortunately I was able to find package on the web. Unfortunately – installing old ...

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Model fitting exam problem

20.05.2013

Recently I have run an exam where the following question had risen many problems for students (here I give its shortened formulation). You are given the data generating process y = 10x + e, where e is error term. Fit linear regression using lm, neural net using nnet with size equal to 2 and 10 and regression tree using rpart. What...

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Regression regularization example

31.05.2013

Recently I needed a simple example showing when application of regularization in regression is worthwhile. Here is the code I came up with (along with basic application of parallelization of code execution). Assume you have 60 observations and 50 explanatory variables x1 to x50. All these variables are IID from uniform distribution on...

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Testing function arguments in GNU R

28.06.2013

Recently I have read a nice post on ensuring that proper arguments are passed to a function using GNU R class system. However, I often need a more lightweight solution to repetitive function argument testing.The alternative idea is to test function arguments against a specified pattern given in a string. The pattern I use has the form...

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Testing function agruments in GNU R

28.06.2013

Recently I have read a nice post on ensuring that proper arguments are passed to a function using GNU R class system. However, I often need a more lightweight solution to repetitive function argument testing.The alternative idea is to test function arguments against a specified pattern given in a string. The pattern I use has the form...

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Genetic drift simulation

13.08.2013

While preparing for the new teaching semester I have created an implementation of NetLogo GenDrift P local in GNU R.The model works as follows. Initially a square grid having side size is randomly populated with n types of agents (denoted by colors).Each agent randomly changes type (color) to one of its eight neighbors colors. In...

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Visualizing optimization process

08.09.2013

One of the approaches to graph drawing is application of so called force-directed algorithms. In its simplest form the idea is to layout the nodes on plane so that all edges in the graph have approximately equal length. This problem has very intuitive visualization so it is a nice case for showing how different optimization algorithms...

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Cont model back after a year

16.10.2013

During ESSA2013 conference I had a discussion about Cont model I have commented a year ago.In original paper Cont highlights that his model produces distribution of returns characterized by positive excess kurtosis. In this post I want to investigate this assertion.Cont simulation has three key parameters (check out the paper for det...

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Cont model – Part II

28.10.2013

In my last post I have investigated properties of Cont model (you can download the paper here). Today I would like to show how we can use simulations to further simplify its analysis.First let us start with the observation that the model does not really require two parameters d and l as they are directly linked. If we multiply d�...

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Calibration of p-value under variable selection: an example

14.11.2013

Very often people report p-values for linear regression estimates after performing variable selection step. Here is a simple simulation that shows that such a procedure might lead to wrong calibration of such tests.Consider a simple data generating process where y ~ N(0, 1) and x1, x2 ~ U(0,1). Assume that we take n=20 independent sam...

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