Publications by Dave Giles

RStudio

22.06.2011

If you’re a user of the R statistical software environment (and you should be – if you’re not, it’s the best free lunch in town), then the (fairly) recently released RStudio user interface will undoubtedly interest you. Here’s a quote from the description on their website, to give you the flavour:“RStudio brings together everything y...

1667 sym

gretl

24.06.2011

In comments on a recent post, “Ben” and Tal Galili very sensibly asked if I could make R code available for the econometric analysis in my posts, in addition to EViews code. I’ll be trying to do this wherever I can, given the time constraints.The important point implicit in these comments is that R is free, open-source, software, whereas ...

1973 sym

p-Values for Cointegration Tests With Breaks in the Data

28.06.2011

In an earlier post I went through some econometrics that involved the problem of testing for multivariate cointegration in the case where there are one or more trend-breaks or level-breaks in the time-series data.  Specifically, I talked about the modified Trace tests introduced by Johansen et al. (2000), and I mentioned the really nice discu...

2549 sym 2 img

Reproducible Econometric Research

25.08.2011

I doubt if anyone would deny the importance of being able to reproduce one’s econometric results. More importantly, other researchers should be able to reproduce our results to verify (a) that we’ve done what we said we did; (b) to investigate the sensitivity of our results to the various choices we made (e.g., functional form of our model, c...

4249 sym

R 2.14.0 Released

31.10.2011

A Halloween treat for R users! Version 2.14.0 was released today. Among other things there are big improvements for parallel processing. For a quick synopsis of the new “goodies”, see the post on the Revolutions blog.© 2011, David E. Giles Related To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: Econom...

657 sym

Just Crantastic!

26.12.2011

If you’re an econometrician and you don’t use the R software environment – for at least some of your work, then you’re missing out on all sorts of (free!) opportunities.Yes, it can be a steep learning curve, but it’s worth every drop of sweat, and there are some great R community sites that will help you along the way. One obvious examp...

1005 sym

BIG Data

31.12.2011

“Big Data” = data that come in amounts that are too large for current computer hardware and software to deal with. That sounds like fun!Norman Nie developed the well known SPSS statistical package in the 1960, and is currently President and CEO of Revolution Analytics, a California company that promotes the use of the R computing environment ...

1661 sym

New Year Resolutions

01.01.2012

Well, here we go again! It’s time of year that we make all of those resolutions – the ones that usually get broken before the holiday decorations have been packed away. Not this year, though!In 2012, and in no particular order, I firmly resolve to:Increase my use of the R statistical environment in my research and teaching, and foster “...

1260 sym

Influential People in the "Big Data" Field

04.02.2012

Yesterday, Haydn Shaughnnessy wrote a piece for Forbes titled, Who are the Top 20 Influencers in Big Data?Fans of R will be delighted to see David Smith of Revolution Analytics up there at number 2!Congratulations!© 2012, David E. Giles Related To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: ...

666 sym

The Popularity of Statistical Packages

15.04.2012

No matter what your favourite statistical package is, you’ll find this post by Robert Muenchen highly informative.Robert concludes that:“By most of the measures discussed here, R is competing well with the commercial software vendors. However, I advise not over generalizing from this data. SAS and SPSS continue to dominate the corporate world...

900 sym