Publications by Francis Smart
Estimating Variance as a Function of Treatment Rank Class
Imagine that we have a treatment that we give to five different groups of individuals. Each individual has a variable response which as a unique mean and variance based on the treatment. We do not know how the means will change but we believe the variance of responses will expand depending upon what level of treatment the individual gets. W...
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Why use R? Five reasons.
In this post I will go through 5 reasons: zero cost, crazy popularity, awesome power, dazzling flexibility, and mind-blowing support. I believe R is the best statistical programming language to learn. As a blogger who has contributed over 150 posts in Stata and over 100 in R I have extensive experience with both a proprietary statistical progra...
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Stata Fully Mapped into R
Hello all of you Stata loving statistical analysts out there! I have great news. I am finally nearly done with the package I have been working on which provides the mechanism for Stata users to seamlessly move from Stata to R though use of my new package “RStata”!In this package I have taken 150 of the most commonly used commands in Stata...
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Does R have too many packages?
The Homeless EconometricianThe amazing growth and success of CRAN (Comprehensive R Archive Network) is marked by the thousands of packages have been developed and released by a highly active user base. Yet even so, one of the founders and primary maintainers of CRAN Kurt Hornik in the Autrian Journal of Statistics (2012) is asking the question,...
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Getting Social Sciences Out of the Black Box: The Open Access Revolution
Trading Ethos for LogosUp until very recently (the last 10 years) it has been uncommon for social science researchers to share their data even when the sharing would neither compromise the private information of the subjects nor the validity of the study. [1]Even more uncommon is it for researchers to willingly share the code they used to transfo...
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Public Universities Should Use Open Source Software
The Homeless Econometrician: Black Box SoftwareChoosing to go open source is a big deal. It means that when asking for help or new improvements you are dealing with a highly active and generous user community which enjoys helping instead of a corporation which needs to justify the expense of providing customer service by extracting fees either ...
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Investigating the relationship between gold and bitcoin prices with R.
Image by Ennio Pozzetti In this post I will explore some of the movements in markets in recent years, these movements have caught many by surprise resulting in some people unexpectedly striking it rich while others have lost a great deal. I am no financial advisor, nor do I have a background in financial analysis, so please take everything with ...
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Bitsanity
BitsanityThe awesome folks at Quandl (an amazing data collection and distribution service) have been so kind as to allow me to write for their blog.In my first post for them I demonstrate (with detailed R code) how a user of their free data services could easily compare the relationship between time series data in different markets. In my parti...
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RStata: Funny or just annoying?
Okay okay. The joke is up. Besides likely necessitating an emergency call to from the Stata Management Team to the Stata Legal Team, my post on April 1st of 2014 entitled “RStata: Stata Fully Mapped into R“, was intended as a practical joke.Yet, perhaps as a joke on me, the post has become one of my most popular posts of all time with ove...
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A Weekend With Julia: An R User’s Reflections
The Famous Julia First off, I am not going to talk much about Julia’s speed. Everybody has seen the tables and graphs showing how in this benchmark or another, Julia is tens times or a hundred times faster than R. Most blog posts talking about Julia test the generality of these results (Bogumił Kamiński 2013, Randy Zwitch 2013, and Wes Mc...
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