Publications by David Smith
In case you missed it: September 2018 roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from September of particular interest to R users. R code by Barry Rowlingson to replicate an XKCD comic about curve fitting. The rayshader package creates 3-D relief maps in R with perspective, shadows, and depth of field. The R Developer's Guide to Azure, with links to documentation for Azure cloud...
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A few upcoming R conferences
Here are some conferences focused on R taking place in the next few months: Oct 26: Nor'eastR Conference (Providence, RI). A one-day R conference, organized by grassroots R community members in the Northeastern US. Oct 27: SatRdays Belgrade (Serbia). Another city joins the popular SatRDays series of one-day, community led conferences. Nov ...
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R Consortium grant applications due October 31
Since 2015, the R Consortium has funded projects of benefit to, and proposed by, the R community. Twice a year, the R Consortium Infrastructure Steering Committee reviews grant proposals and makes awards based on merit and funds available. (Those funds come, in turn, from the annual dues paid by R Consortium members.) If you'd like to propose a ...
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How R gets built on Windows
I wasn't at the Use of R in Official Statistics (uRos2018) conference in the Netherlands last month, but I'm thankful to Jeroen Ooms for sharing the slides from his keynote presentation. In addition to being a postdoc staffer at ROpenSci, Jeroen maintains the official repository for the daily R builds on Windows — you might recognize his name f...
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The Economist’s Big Mac Index is calculated with R
The Economist's Big Mac Index (also described on Wikipedia if you're not a subscriber) was created (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) as a measure to compare the purchasing power of money in different countries. Since Big Macs are available just about everywhere in the world, the price of a Big Mac in Sweden — expressed in US dollars — gives an Amer...
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A small logical change with big impact
In R, the logical || (OR) and && (AND) operators are unique in that they are designed only to work with scalar arguments. Typically used in statements like while(iter < 1000 && eps < 0.0001) continue_optimization() the assumption is that the objects on either side (in the example above, iter and eps) are single values (that is, vectors of len...
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Maryland’s Bridge Safety, reported using R
A front-page story in the Baltimore Sun reported last week on the state of the bridges in Maryland. Among the report’s findings: 5.4% of bridges are classified in “poor” or “structurally deficient” condition 13% of bridges in the city of Baltimore are in “poor” condition Those findings were the result of analysis of Federal infras...
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Computer Vision for Model Assessment
One of the differences between statistical data scientists and machine learning engineers is that while the latter group are concerned primarily with the predictive performance of a model, the former group are also concerned with the fit of the model. A model that misses important structures in the data — for example, seasonal trends, or a poor...
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When the numbers don’t tell the whole story
Anscombe's Quartet is a famous collection of four small data sets — just 11 (x,y) pairs each — that was developed in the 1970s to emphasize the fact that sometimes, numerical summaries of data aren't enough. (For a modern take on this idea, see also the Datasaurus Dozen.) In this case, it takes visualizing the data to realize that the for da...
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Spooky! Gravedigger in R
Need something to distract the kids while they're waiting to head out Trick-or-Treating? You could have them try out a Creepy Computer Game in R! Engineer and social scientist Dr Peter Provost translated one of the old BASIC games from the classic book Creepy Computer Games into R: just have them type in this file (and yes, they do need to type...
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