Publications by Murtaza Haider
Handling Large Investment Datasets with R: A Powerful Solution to Data Management Challenges
Dealing with large datasets—where observations run into the millions and file sizes reach gigabytes or more—can be daunting for many data practitioners. However, there is no shortage of specialized tools, many of which are open source, that offer efficient solutions for such challenges.I illustrate the challenges of handling large data sets wit...
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How to append two tables in R Markdown?
Here is the task: how to append two tables using R Markdown? The need arose because I was demonstrating to graduate students in a research methods course how to prepare Table 1, which often covers descriptive statistics in an empirical paper. I used tableone package in R to compute the summary statistics. The task was to replicate the first t...
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GUIs for R
A recent post listed at R Bloggers (https://www.r-bloggers.com/r-guis-which-one-fits-you/) made some erroneous statements about R Commander. Here is a revised description of R Commander with some issues addressed from the earlier blog:R Commander works on Mac as well in addition to Windows and Linux. The user interface is nicer on Mac...
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Google maps and travel times
Travel times and trip distances are at the core of urban economics. Many models of competition, housing markets, etc., rely on travel times or distances to explain the variance in economic outcomes. Determining travel times, especially non free-flow travel times (i.e., accounting for congestion) is however no trivial task. Google maps offer a uni...
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R ready to Deduce you
Despite being one of the most powerful computing platforms, and being free at the same time, R still struggles against other statistical software, such as SPSS and SAS, in gaining mass appeal amongst users of statistical and market intelligence software. Many have cited the absence of a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) for R to be par...
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Painting a picture of statistical packages
Imagine you have to analyze text comprising 18,000 words. You have to identify the most commonly cited ideas or words in the text and then present the analysis in a graphic format. There are sophisticated tools out there to help you with this task, but then again there is a tight deadline. You have fewer than five minutes to accomplish the task. ...
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Speeding tickets for R and Stata
How fast is R? Is it as fast in executing routines as the other off-the-shelf software, such as Stata? After some comparative experimentation, I found Stata to be 5 to 8 times faster than R. For me, speed has not been a concern in the past. I had used R with smaller datasets of roughly 5000 to 10,000 observations and found it to be as fast as ...
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Going over the speed limit
In an earlier post [Speeding tickets for R and Stata] I had reported on how R compared with Stata for executing algorithms involving maximum likelihood estimation. This post offers the following updates on the last post: Stata is in fact even faster than previously reported. The 64-bit version of the newly released R 2.13.0 reports faster t...
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Stata 12 embraces structural equation models
Stata 12 has just been announced. The software will start shipping by the end of July. A key new feature introduced in the new version is the module for structural equation models (SEM), a staple tool in marketing, psychology, and several other research disciplines.LISREL and AMOS have been the two most commonly used software to estimate SEM. P...
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Are students’ teaching evaluations influenced by instructors’ looks?
Are students’ teaching evaluations influenced by instructors’ looks? ggplot2 may help find the answer.The recent release of RcmdrPlugin.KMggplot2 has made ggplot2 available to those who prefer GUI to the command line interface. With the new plugin for Rcmdr, one can simply point and click and within seconds can have an amazing pub...
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