Tips for the R beginner (a 5 page overview)

In this post I publish a PDF document titled “A collection of tips for R in Finance”.
It is a basic 5 page introduction to R in finances by Arnaud Amsellem (linked in profile).

The article offers tips related to the following points:

  • Code Editor
  • Organizing R code
  • Update packages
  • Getting external data into R
  • Communicating with external applications
  • Optimizing R code

This article is well articulated, and offers a perspective of someone who is experienced in the field and touches points that I can imagine beginners might otherwise overlook. I hope publishing it here will be of use to some readers out there.

Update: as some readers have noted to me (by e-mail, and by commenting), this document touches very lightly on the topic of “finances” in R. I therefore decided to update the title from “R in finance – some tips for beginners”, to it’s current form.

Lastly: if you (a reader of this blog) feel you have an article (“post”) to contribute, but don’t feel like starting your own blog, feel welcome to contact me, and I’ll be glad to post what you have to say on my blog (and subsequently, also on R bloggers).

Here is the article:
Continue reading “Tips for the R beginner (a 5 page overview)”

Rose plot using Deducers ggplot2 plot builder

The (excellent!) LearnR blog had a post today about making a rose plot in
ggplot2.

Following today’s announcement, by Ian Fellows, regarding the release of the new version of Deducer (0.4) offering a strong support for ggplot2 using a GUI plot builder, Ian also sent an e-mail where he shows how to create a rose plot using the new ggplot2 GUI included in the latest version of Deducer. After the template is made, the plot can be generated with 4 clicks of the mouse.

Here is a video tutorial (Ian published) to show how this can be used:

The generated template file is available at:
http://neolab.stat.ucla.edu/cranstats/rose.ggtmpl

I am excited about the work Ian is doing, and hope to see more people publish use cases with Deducer.

ggplot2 plot builder is now on CRAN! (through Deducer 0.4 GUI for R)

Ian fellows, a hard working contributer to the R community (and a cool guy), has announced today the release of Deducer (0.4) to CRAN (scheduled to update in the next day or so).
This major update also includes the release of a new plug-in package (DeducerExtras), containing additional dialogs and functionality.

Following is the e-mail he sent out with all the details and demo videos.

Continue reading “ggplot2 plot builder is now on CRAN! (through Deducer 0.4 GUI for R)”