Installing VMware workstation 15 on Manjaro

A few things to notice:

1. Need to install Linux header files;
2. Consult the pinned comments here.

A few useful commands:

• sudo modprobe -a vmw_vmci vmmon
• sudo vmware-modconfig --console --install-all
• sudo systemctl enable vmware-networks
• sudo systemctl start vmware-networks
  

Zapcc with Rstan

I use the brms package, which uses the standard R formula syntax to generate Stan code, which gets translated into C++ code by rstan, get compiled and executed. In this process, a optimized C++ compiler can make a big difference.

Here I ran the brms sample code for the spatial simultaneous autoregressive (SAR) sample code using clang++ and zapcc and benchmared the performance (three times):

clang++: 66.89 (lagsar), 49.02 (errorsar)
zapcc: 56.80 (lagsar), 18.43 (errorsar)

Such a performance boost can be achieved by simply switching a compiler!

Statistical Rethinking with brms, ggplot2, and the tidyverse

Amazing resource here. Great book, very exciting!

Arch-Data-Science

Data science toolkit for Arch and Arch-based system here.

Useful INLA hints

Here is a list of useful INLA resources:

1. Integrated Nested Laplace Approximation (INLA) for (generalized) linear models
2. R-INLA FAQ
3. Linear regression using INLA 

Scraping HTML tables

A few useful examples:

1. http://bradleyboehmke.github.io/2015/12/scraping-html-tables.html
2. http://blog.rstudio.com/2014/11/24/rvest-easy-web-scraping-with-r/

Advanced graphics using ggplot2

Here are a list of good resources:

1. Top 50 ggplot2 Visualizations - The Master List (With Full R Code)
2. ggplot2 extensions
3. ggthemes

Exploring Minard's 1812 plot with ggplot2

Very cool post.

How to get county FIPS from state and place names

This post demonstrates how to use the acs package to extract county FIPS from arbitrary combination of state and city names.

For Stata users, the geoinpoly package can extract FIPS from a combination of latitude and longitude coordinates.