Apologies for the long and unannounced break-- the longest since we started blogging, three and a half years ago. I was writing a 2-day course for SAS users to learn R. Contact me if you're interested. And Nick and I are beginning work on the second...
In the early days of the discipline of statistics, R.A. Fisher argued with great vehemence against Egon Pearson (and Jerzy Neyman) over the foundational notions supporting statistical inference. The personal invective recorded is somewhat amusing an...
In practice, we often find that count data is not well modeled by Poisson regression, though Poisson models are often presented as the natural approach for such data. In contrast, the negative binomial regression model is much more flexible and is the...
In some settings it may be necessary to recode a categorical variable with character values into a variable with numeric values. For example, the matching macro we discussed in example 7.35 will only match on numeric variables. One way to conve...
A colleague is a devotee of confidence intervals. To him, the CI have the magical property that they are immune to the multiple comparison problem-- in other words, he feels its OK to look at a bunch of 95% CI and focus on the ones that appear to exc...
Back in example 8.41 we showed how to make a graphic combining a scatterplot with histograms of each variable. A commenter suggested we change the R graphic to allow post-hoc plotting of, for example, lowess lines. In addition, there are further ...
In example 10.1 we introduced data from a CPAP machine. In brief, it's hard to tell exactly what's being recorded in the data set, but it seems to be related to the pattern of breathing. Measurements are taken five times a second, leading to on the o...
More and more makers of electronic devices use standard storage media to record data. Sometimes this is central to the device's function, as in a camera, so that the data must be easy to recover. Other times, it's effectively incidental, and the devi...
July marks the end of three years of blogging for us. By our count, we've posted 121 examples across the first three years. We aim to be helpful and interesting.As always, it's hard to get a sense of our readership. At the time we wrote this, Feedbur...
One of us recently read a colleague's first draft of a paper, in which she had written: "All analyses were done in R 2.14.0." We assume we're preaching to the converted here, when we say that the enormous amount of work that goes into R needs to be re...
