Publications by David Smith
RStan: Fast, multilevel Bayesian modeling in R
For the last decade or so, the go-to software for Bayesian statisticians has been BUGS (and later the open-source incarnation, OpenBugs, or JAGS). BUGS is used for multi-level modeling: using a specialized notation, you can define random variables of various distributions, set Bayesian priors for their parameters, and create the network of relati...
3070 sym R (488 sym/1 pcs)
How to create random binary matrices in R
It all started off as a simple question from Scott Chamberlain on Twitter: Make m x n matrix with randomly assigned 0/1 -> apply(m, c(1,2), function(x) sample(c(0,1),1)) — Better/faster solution? #rstats — Scott Chamberlain (@recology_) August 28, 2012 The goal was to create a matrix with randomly selected binary elements, and a predetermi...
2138 sym R (100 sym/1 pcs)
Style your ggplot2 charts with Themes
An update to the ggplot2 “grammar of graphics” package for R is now available on CRAN. This version introduces “Themes” for ggplot2 charts, and makes it possible to define and re-use your own preferences for title fonts and sizes, tick marks, grid color, etc. The system is heirarchically defined, so for example you can choose a font and h...
1257 sym 2 img
In case you missed it: August 2012 Roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from June of particular interest to R users. RStan is a new package for Bayesian modeling with R. It's faster and can fit more highly-correlated models than the MCMC sampler of BUGS and JAGS. Biostatistician Corey Chivers used R to animate the epidemic-like growth of retailer Walmart in the US.For...
3020 sym
Kickstarter facilitates $50M in indie game funding
The social crowdfunding site Kickstarter announced today that it has enabled, via community contributions, $50M in funding in 2012 for new indie games. The second largest category of funding was for independent films. The blog post announcing the news includes analysis (using R, natch) of the breakdown in categories and funding sources. On ...
1308 sym 2 img
Coming up: Two weeks of awesome guest bloggers
I'm heading out on vacation to my Australian homeland for the next two weeks, but fear not reader friends: we have an awesome lineup of guest bloggers to fill in while I'm away. I don't want to ruin the surprise, but you'll be seeing posts from: experts in data visualization about how they use R; members of the R community on new R packages; R us...
1290 sym
Population health management with RevoScaleR
This guest post is by Douglas McNair MD PhD, Engineering Fellow & President, Cerner Math Inc. — ed. RevoScaleR scaling big-data modeling performance for real-time health data analysis at Cerner The size of data sets is increasing much more rapidly than the speed of cores, of RAM, and of disk drives. This is particularly true of electronic hea...
4999 sym
Integrate data and reporting on the Web with knitr
Today's guest post comes from Yihui Xie, author of the knitr package — ed. Hi, this is Yihui Xie, and I'm guest posting on the Revolutions blog to talk about one aspect of the knitr package: how we can integrate data analysis and reporting in R with the Web. This post includes both the work that has been done and the ongoing work. For those wh...
6942 sym
Tutorials for Learning Visualization in R
Today's guest post comes from Nathan Yau. Nathan runs FlowingData, a site on statistics and visualization, and is the author of Visualize This. Years ago, when I started FlowingData, the purpose of the blog was to catalog and think out loud about visualization, in its many varieties. In the beginning I was talking to myself for the most part, ...
2715 sym 6 img
Effective Graphs with R
Today's guest post is by Naomi Robbins, author of the Effective Graphs blog — ed. I write a blog on effective graphs for Forbes. David Smith invited me to write a guest post here that was a roundup of some of my Forbes posts where R was used. My use of R graphics has ranged from simple box plots and dot plots to examples of diverging stacked b...
4345 sym 8 img