StatEt in Ubuntu 10.04
I wanted a “lightweight” version of Eclipse to run R from Ubuntu. (I installed eclipse-pde using apt-get. It worked fine.) Once it was running, I installed StatEt via the “Install new software” feature...
View ArticleMessing with R packages
This was really frustrating. I’m trying to modify a package from Matt Johnson and although I could get the package he sent me to install flawlessly, I couldn’t un-tar it, make a change, re-tar it, and...
View ArticleRevolution R with Eclipse Helios
One of the reasons that I don’t often take advantage of the cool features in Revolution R is that I absolutely can’t stand their Visual Studio interface. Previously, if I wanted to run something in...
View ArticleR is not C
I keep trying to write R code like it was C code. It is a habit I’m trying to break myself of. For example, the other day I need to construct a model matrix of 1′s and 0′s in the standard, counting in...
View ArticleGetting R2WinBUGS to talk to WinBUGS 1.4 on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
Disclaimer 1: WinBUGS is old and not maintained. There are other packages to use, if you would like to take advantage of more modern developments in MCMC such as: PyMC which transparently implements...
View ArticleManaging memory in a list of lists data structure
First, a confession: instead of using classes and defining methods for them, I build a lot of ad hoc data structures out of lists and then build up one-off methods that operate on those lists of lists....
View ArticleMy Stat Bytes talk, with slides and code
On Thursday of last week I gave a short informal talk to Stat Bytes, the CMU Statistics department‘s twice a month computing seminar. Quick tricks for faster R code: Profiling to Parallelism Abstract:...
View ArticleFor faster R use OpenBLAS instead: better than ATLAS, trivial to switch to on...
R speeds up when the Basic Linear Algebra System (BLAS) it uses is well tuned. The reference BLAS that comes with R and Ubuntu isn’t very fast. On my machine, it takes 9 minutes to run a well known R...
View ArticleWriting a Metropolis-Hastings within Gibbs sampler in R for a 2PL IRT model...
Last year, Brian Junker, Richard Patz, and I wrote an invited chapter for the (soon to be released) update of the classic text Handbook of Modern Item Response Theory (1996). The chapter itself is...
View ArticleImplementing mclapply() on Windows: a primer on embarrassingly parallel...
An easy way to run R code in parallel on a multicore system is with the mclapply() function. Unfortunately, mclapply() does not work on Windows machines because the mclapply() implementation relies on...
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