Publications by matloff
Greatly Revised Edition of Tidyverse Skeptic
As a longtime R user and someone with a passionate interest in how people learn, I continue to be greatly concerned about the use of the Tidyverse in teaching noncoder learners of R. Accordingly, I have now thoroughly revised my Tidyverse Skeptic essay. It is greatly reorganized with focus on teaching R, with a number of new examples, and some ma...
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A Major Contribution to Learning R
Prominent statistician Frank Harrell has come out with a radically new R tutorial, rflow. The name is short for “R workflow,” but I call it “R in a box” –everything one needs for beginning serious usage of R, starting from little or no background. By serious usage I mean real applications in which the user has a substantial computation...
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Comments on the New R OOP System, R7
Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) is more than just a programming style; it’s a philosophy. R has offered various forms of OOP, starting with S3, then (among others) S4, reference classes, and R6, and now R7. The latter has been under development by a team broadly drawn from the R community leadership, not only the “directors” of R develop...
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New Blog on R, Statistics, Data Science and So On
Hi, Norm Matloff here. I’m a professor of computer science at UC Davis, and was a founding member of the UCD Dept. of Statistics. You may know my book, The Art of R Programming (NSP, 2011). I have some strong views on statistics–which you are free to call analytics, data science, machine learning or whatever your favorite term is–so I...
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The freqparcoord Package for Multivariate Visualization
Recently my student Yingkang Xie and I have developed freqparcoord, a novel approach to the parallel coordinates method for multivariate data visualization. Our approach: Addresses the screen-clutter problem in parallel coordinates, by only plotting the “most typical” cases, meaning those with the highest estimated multivariate density va...
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Adding Annotation to R Objects
When you take a photograph, you can include the date in the image, so you remember when you created it. (In fact, under EXIF format, it’s stored in the image file anyway, even if it doesn’t appear in the picture.) Wouldn’t it be nice to make annotations in the objects you create under R? For example, here is a random forests analysis I ...
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More on freqparcoord
In a previous post, I introduced my new package with Yingkang Xie, freqparcoord. Here I’ll illustrate some of the other uses to which the package can be applied. The freqparcoord package visualizes multivariate data by plotting the most frequent cases in the data, as defined by multivariate density estimation. The example in the previous post i...
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Use of freqparcoord for Regression Diagnostics
This is the third in my series of three posts on my package freqparcoord with Yingkang Xie. (My next post after this will show how to use R to explore one of my favorite examples of “what can go wrong” in statistics.) Here is a very brief review of my previous posts regarding freqparcoord. A parallel coordinates plot draws one vertical axis f...
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Simpson’s Paradox Is Back
The latest issue of the American Statistician has a set of thought-provoking point/counterpoint papers on Simpson’s Paradox, with a tie-in to the controversial issue of causality. (I will not address the causality issue here.) Since I have long had my own thoughts about Simpson’s, I’ll postpone the topic I had planned to post this week, a...
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What Can Go Wrong: My Favorite Example
I’m one of many who bemoan the fact that statistics is typically thought of as — alas, even taught as — a set of formula plugging methods. One enters one’s data, turns the key, and the proper answers pop out. This of course is not the case at all, and arguably statistics is as much an art as a science. Or as I like to put it, you can�...
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