Publications by David Smith
Because it’s Friday: Detecting Cylons
Battlestar Galactica (Ronald D Moore’s reimagined version of the rather cheesy 70’s sci-fi series) has been my favourite TV series (of any genre) of recent years, so I’m especially excited that Chris Bilder has given me the chance to blog about it. Chris, an Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Nebraska-L...
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R 2.10.1 released
The latest update to R, R 2.10.1, is now available for download in source form from your local CRAN mirror. Binary versions (for Mac, Windows, and Linux) will become available over the next few days. As a maintenance release, this update focuses on minor changes and bug fixes. The complete list of changes is available in the NEWS file, but some o...
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NYT on breast cancer screening and probability
The New York Times last weekend looked at the controversy around the recent changes to the mammogram guidelines from a mathematical perspective. Compared to the analysis based on Bayes’ Theorem from the Harvard Social Science Statistics blog (which apparently caused some controversy itself: that post was deleted and later replaced after some er...
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According to Microsoft, the fourth paradigm of science is data
In scientific discovery, the first three paradigms were experimental, theoretical and (more recently) computational science. A new book of essays published by Microsoft (and available for free download — kudos, MS!) argues that a fourth paradigm of scientific discovery is at hand: the analysis of massive data sets. The book is dedicated to the...
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Why use plyr?
The “apply” family of functions in R (apply, sapply, lapply) is a very powerful suite of tools for iterating through structures of data and returning the combined results of each iteration. But with great power comes great responsibility (or something like that): these functions can sometimes be frustratingly difficult to get working exactly ...
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Because it’s Friday: The decline of empires
Here’s a neat visualization of the decline of the British, Spanish, Portugese and French empires from 1800 to present day. It’s definitely more art than stats — judging by the relative size of India and Australia I think the circles are scaled to area, not population — but it definitely does capture the drama and the ebb and flow of colon...
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Singapore, February 19-20: Computational Topics in Finance
With all of the winter snows in the US this weekend, a trip to equatorial climes sounds pretty good right about now. That makes this email announcement from Rmetrics leader Diethelm Wuertz all the more tempting: Conference on ‘Computational Topics in Finance’February 19/20, 2010, National University of Singapore Dear R/Rmetrics Community, We...
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Forecasting the weather with R
The US National Centers for Environment Prediction (NCEP) produces weather forecasts for the entire world from a model that’s updated every 6 hours. The data is made freely available, and with a couple of free tools to convert the data and R you can easily produce am unpdated global weather forecast like this (click to enlarge): (Check out the ...
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R in India: The Hindu
The Hindu, a leading English-language newspaper in India, published an article on December 21 about doing research with open-source tools and R got a prominent mention: Though commercial statistical packages are popular among researchers, their licensing costs drive people away from them. In this context, R https://www.r-project.org, the open s...
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A web-based graphics application based on R
FlowingData recently took a look at Jeroen Ooms’ latest web-based statistical tool based on R. We’ve looked at his tools for random-effects models and finance visualizations before, but this one is a more general tool for creating graphs from data sets using the ggplot2 package. It’s pretty slick. All you need to do is upload a data set (in...
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