RStudio is good for you
I was recently introduced to RStudio, a new integrated development environment for R, it is just amazing!
It is free, and open, compatible with PC/Mac/Linux OSs. You can also choose to run it in the cloud, and access it from your favorite web browser.
As you can see, the window divides into four in a customizable way. For the source code, multiple files are organized by tabs. The editor is great, providing code completion (for commands and existing variables), indentation, and syntax highlighting. Execution from source can be done with the Run icons (as well as saving, printing), or by a shortcut (Command or Ctrl+Enter). For more shortcuts you can check this page.
Another quadrant is for Workspace and History. The first lists as in Matlab all your current variables. You can have a quick look to them by clicking (equivalent to the View command), and edit your functions (equivalent to the fix command). It makes easy to import datasets from text files or from the Web. The bottom left quadrant allows to browse your files. A very interesting feat is the Plots tab, which stores all the past plots. You can export at the end the one you want, in pdf or png. It includes as well a package installation tool, and the R documentation.
For enabling access from any Web browser, there exists the RStudio Server version, to be installed on a Linux server. It’s great for team projects, as you can enable access to anyone by giving the server url. It allows to install exotic packages on a single server, which is good when you have restrictions on other computers. And you can check from a remote position the results of your computations you are drawing for the week-end. It looks like that:
For people at ENSAE, admin registration is not required for installing RStudio, so don’t hesitate to give it a try!
How to make a poster with LaTeX
Hi,
Making posters is also part of a PhD student’s life, and there’s a lot of ways to do it. Here are two packages to create a poster using LaTeX.
- package baposter : it provides a pretty flexible set of commands, and using the template files provided with the package it’s really a piece of cake to make your own. The image above is the result of one of the provided templates.
- package beamerposter : it’s built upon beamer, so in some way it might be easier to use for beamer users, and not necessarily so for the others. The results can be very good as well, here is an example. Lots of templates are provided. I guess if you want to match your posters and your presentations, that’s the (only?) way to go.
Other methods are described on plenty of webpages but I think these two are the easiest to get a fancy poster done in a few hours.
EDIT: the a0poster package does the job too, thanks Xian!
Statisfaction on R-bloggers
This is the first post of Statisfaction on R-bloggers. As an introduction: we are PhD students and postdocs at CREST, a research centre on economics and statistics located in Paris, France. We jointly share tips and tricks useful in our everyday jobs, links to various pages, articles, conferences, seminars, including a PhD student seminar at CREST. Since we happen to write stuff about R, we are joining the community through the R-bloggers aggregator.
In case you missed them, here are a few entries related to R:
A few days in Bordeaux
Hi again,
Next week I’ll spend three days in Bordeaux, courtesy of the ALEA (Advanced Learning Evolutionary Algorithms) team led by Pierre Del Moral. The plan is to meet François Caron and Pierre Del Moral, who are (among other things) working in cutting-edge Monte Carlo simulation techniques and their theoretical validation. On Tuesday I’ll have the opportunity to present the SMC^2 algorithm in their working group, a joint work with Nicolas Chopin and Omiros Papaspiliopoulos about which I’ve blogged before. I’m already very grateful to the ALEA team for this opportunity!
It’s also an opportunity to meet Luke Bornn (PhD student at UBC, Vancouver and currently visiting the ALEA team) again, whom I’m working with on another Monte Carlo method, more on this soon…
Greek Stochastics
Hey again,
Four of us CREST younglings (Robin, Julyan, Christian and Pierre) are attending Greek Stochastics “gamma” at the end of May. It’s the third edition of this meeting focusing on MCMC methods. The conference’s website:
And this time it’s located in Crete…! Robin and Julyan will present a poster on ABC and Gibbs estimation of a rank data (=Thurstonian) regression model with an application to the Eurovision Song Contest vote.
Pierre will present a talk on a Parallel Adaptive Wang Landau algorithm; it’s about a bunch of improvements for the Wang-Landau algorithm with applications to Bayesian inference (joint work with Luke Bornn, Pierre Del Moral and Arnaud Doucet).
Christian will present a poster on Stochastic approaches to unconstrained quadratic binary optimization, about a general Sequential Monte Carlo approach to the Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization problem which is an NP-hard standard problem in combinatorial optimization.
We’re all very much looking forward to it!
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