Publications by richierocks
user2013: The caret tutorial
This afternoon I went to Max Kuhn’s tutorial on his caret package. caret stands for classification and regression (something beginning with e) trees. It provides a consistent interface to nearly 150 different models in R, in much the same way as the plyr package provides a consistent interface to the apply functions. The basic usage of caret ...
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How R will turn into SQL
Up until very recently the only way of running R code was through the standard R distribution. Of course you could use another IDE, but somewhere underneath it all you would be running the same, standard R engine from the R-core team. This is no longer your only option. A couple of weeks ago Radford Neal released pqR, a research project that re...
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The Secrets of Inverse Brogramming, reprise
Brogramming is the art of looking good while you write code. Inverse brogramming is a silly term that I’m trying to coin for the opposite, but more important, concept: the art of writing good looking code. At useR2013 I gave a talk on inverse brogramming in R – for those of you who weren’t there but live in North West England, I’m repeat...
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The tenure of Doctor Who incarnations
With a new actor being announced tomorrow, it got me pondering about the good Doctor. Specifically, who is the longest serving doctor? IMDB has the data: whos <- data.frame( doctor = c( "William Hartnell", "Patrick Troughton", "Jon Pertwee", "Tom Baker", "Peter Davison", "Colin Baker", "Sylvester McCoy", "Paul ...
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Fearsome Engines, Part 1
Back in June I discovered pqR, Radford Neal’s fork of R designed to improve performance. Then in July, I heard about Tibco’s TERR, a C++ rewrite of the R engine suitable for the enterprise. At this point it dawned on me that R might end up like SQL, with many different implementations of a common language suitable for different purposes. As...
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O’Reilly R ebooks half price – today only
Including my hot-off-the-press Learning R. Buy two copies! http://oreil.ly/1eRrhP1 Tagged: book, deal, oreilly, r, special offer Related To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: 4D Pie Charts » R. R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials about learning R and many o...
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Webcast on Writing Great R Code
While I’m promoting things, you might also want to know that I’m doing a webcast on how to write great R code next Wednesday. It’s at 6pm British Summer Time or 10am Pacific Daylight Time. the big problem with being a data scientist is that you have to be a statistician and a programmer, which is really two full time jobs, and consequently...
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Fearsome Engines Part 2: Innovations and new features
There are lots of R engines emerging! I’ve interviewed members of each of the teams involved in these projects. In part 1 of this series, we covered the motivation of each project. This part looks at the technical achievements and new features. Many of the innovations are performance improvements, reflecting the primary goal of several of the...
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Fearsome Engines Part 3: Which one should you use?
There are lots of R engines emerging! I’ve interviewed members of each of the teams involved in these projects. In part 1 of this series, we covered the motivation of each project. Part 2 looked at the technical achievements and new features. This part tries to determine which projects are suitable for which users. Compatibility CXXR and pqR...
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Introducing the pathological package for manipulating paths, files and directories
I was recently hunting for a function that will strip the extension from a file – changing foo.png to foo, and so forth. I was knitting a report, and wanted to replace the file extension of the input with the extension of the the output file. (knitr handles this automatically in most cases but I had some custom logic in there that meant I had...
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