R
Clegg vs Pleb: An XKCD-esque chart
I saw an interesting “challenge” on StackOverflow last night to create an XKCD style chart in R. A couple of hours later & going in a very similar direction to a couple of the answers on SO, I got to something that looked pretty good, using the sin and cos curves for simple and reproducible … Continue reading
Why are pirates called pirates?
In homage to International Talk Like a Pirate Day… I recently stumbled across a series of blog posts from the folks at IDV that visualised the archive of recorded pirate attacks which has been collected by the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. It’s a dataset of 6000+ pirate attacks which have been recorded over the last 30 … Continue reading
R: Creating a shortcut to run a gWidgets GUI
I’ve been playing around with using gWidgets on Windows over the last few weeks as a way of creating front ends for various functions and set of functions that I’ve created, so that non R users can have the benefit of these without having to write a single line of code. The likes of 4Dpiecharts … Continue reading
Visualising the Path of a Genetic Algorithm
We quite regularly use genetic algorithms to optimise over the ad-hoc functions we develop when trying to solve problems in applied mathematics. However it’s a bit disconcerting to have your algorithm roam through a high dimensional solution space while not being able to picture what it’s doing or how close one solution is to another. … Continue reading
118 years of US State Weather Data
A recent post on the Junkcharts blog looked at US weather dataand the importance of explaining scales (which in this case went up to 118). Ultimately, it turns out that 118 is the rank of the data compared to the previous 117 years of data (in ascending order, so that 118 is the highest). At … Continue reading
Non overlapping labels on a ggplot scatterplot
This is a very quick post just to share a quick tip on how to add non overlapping labels to a scatterplot in ggplot using a great package called directlabels. The trick is to make each point a single member group using an aesthetic like colour and then apply the direct.label function with the first.qp … Continue reading
Some new functions I’ve discovered in R
I’ve been writing a fair amount of R recently and have been going through a good learning period, here are some functions that I’ve discovered (mainly plyr and reshape related) and thought I would share: merge_all is a good way to merge multiple different data frames, rather than multiple merge commands. The key thing is … Continue reading
Marketing Mix Lab: Visualising The Correlation Matrix
Following on from the previous post here is an R function for visualising correlations between the explanatory variables in your data set. An interesting example is the North Carolina Crime data set that comes with the plm package. This has the following continuous variables: crmrte crimes committed per person prbarr probability of arrest prbarr probability … Continue reading
R: Subsetting a list based on a condition
Quite a handy couple of lines of code to subset a list in R to just those elements which meet a certain condition. Here’s an example to return only those elements of a list which are a certain class. Thanks to this StackOverflow answer.
Marketing Mix Lab: Multicollinearity and Ridge Regression
In marketing mix modelling you have to be very lucky not to run into problems with multicollinearity. It’s in the nature of marketing campaigns that everything tends to happen at once: the TV is supported by radio, both are timed to coincide with the relaunch of the website. One of the techniques that is often … Continue reading
Posts we like
- What Facebook Knows - Technology Review
- Use Decision-Driven Visualization to Activate (Big) Data by Lee Feinberg - BeyeNETWORK
- Wallpapering Fog: It's never been about the data
- Twitter Data Scientist Takes on McDonald's Entire Menu, Survives - Technology Review
- Obama Campaign’s Vast Effort to Re-Enlist ’08 Supporters - NYTimes.com
