Below: two animations (same one twice, just as different speeds) I made from the highway data for the Kaggle traffic prediction competition.

The data are travel times for 61 different sections of Sydney’s M4 freeway, in both directions. The data comes in 3-minute intervals and goes from March 2010 to November 2010, but my video goes through only one week of it in 27-minute intervals to minimize file size.

In my display, I’ve normalized by dividing each section by its average travel time. There is a red line in the middle dividing the data for the two directions–so each point is really for the same location as its reflection.

There’s a bunch that I don’t really know about this data (how are travel times measured?), but making it was fun anyway. I intended to participate in the prediction competition, but I don’t think I really will.

With the code I used, you could create a video at a different time scale, or showing more of the time covered.)

I’m very new to R (and to having a blog, for that matter)–so I’d appreciate any advice that anyone has for me about this stuff.

Thanks to:

• Kaggle
• NSW Roads and Traffic Authorit 
• David Smith, at Revolution Analytics for a post showing how to create flash animations in R 
• Somene on the internet for a a page showing how to include the flash animation in a webpage

[Update:
Animation isn’t working for some? Try these link1, link2. Need flash, either way.

If anyone has advice for me about what the problem is, I’d appreciate that. Maybe it’s related to the fact that I’m trying to embed these in a post at Blogger?]