Publications by Francis Smart
Shout out to "R Handles Big Data"
Searching for SignificanceI just wanted to give a shout out to check out this post by Bob Muenchen on his excellent blog r4stats.com for his exceptional post a little over a year ago entitle “R Handles Big Data“. Related To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: Econometrics by Simulation. R-blog...
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Why are R users so damn Stingy?!
YES R!Looking at rapporter’s recent blog post on “R activity Around the World“, I am shocked by how few users actually monetarily support the R Foundation. Looking at the US for instance there are only 27 donars representing a little more than 0.1% of those registered on R users groups (of which there is nearly 27,000 members) which is a ...
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Dave Giles on "MCMC for Econometrics Students"
In an excellent four part series of posts in March, Dave Giles introduces Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and Gibbs samplers. In these posts he gives a cogent explanation for the reasoning and mechanics involved in this branch of econometrics/statistics as well as clear simulated examples in R.If you have not checked it out yet, now is definite...
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Three Ways to Format R Code for Blogger
Unformatted CodeIf you are like me originally then you might not think it is worth it to spend the extra energy to format your code. After all people can just copy what you have and paste it into their preferred editor which will do its own formatting, no sweat.Well, this might be true for some code in some languages, but in R it really is not ...
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How to Code Something ‘New’ in R
Programming New ThingsI currently have been programming in R for more than half a decade and can now fondly look back on the days when I went on a spring break with Venables’ little blue book (now out of print). Back then I was entertained and wowed by R’s object oriented environment and its intuitive language, the way it seemed you could d...
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7 R Quirks That Will Drive You Nutty
7 R Quirks That Will Drive You Nutty StumpedEvery language has its idiosyncrasies. Some “designer”“ type languages have less due to extreme thoughtfulness of language engineers. I suspect Julia for example has many less quirks. However, despite its quirkiness R has become an amazingly flexible resource for a diverse range of tasks with ...
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Estimating Required Coinage
I would like to code up a simple method of minimizing the number of coins required to give change. Then I would like see what coins are most likely to be called into usage if change is required from a uniform draw between 1 cent and 499 cents. Exported from Notepad++# Define denominations to search throughden c(200,100,25,10,5,1) # I use the 2...
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Item Response Theory and Item Information Exploration
In the following post I will map out some item information functions for item response theory (IRT) models using the common 3 parameter logistic model for binary responses. The model takes three parameters (obviously) which relate to the item features easily named a, b, and c. a refers to item discrimination or ability to tell between subjects wi...
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RStudio Webinar with Hadley Wickham: The Grammar and Graphics of Data Science
RStudio has recently announced a series of free webinars open to the public. The first of these seminars is given by Hadley Wickham, Rice University Professor, RStudio Chief Scientist, and general super-star of the R development world. Contributing author of the popular R packages ggplot2, plyr, testhat, reshape, and several of the other most inn...
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The Rise and Fall of the name Jennifer
A recent fascinating post by Analysis at Large got me interested in naming trends analysis. The original post used Social Security data by state to map out the more frequent names by state. While this sounded interesting it turned out a single name (you can read the post yourself to discover that name) dominated the map for all but two states (Ca...
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