The plots thicken

Every story needs a good plot

One could think of data science as “art, grounded in facts”. It tells a story through visualisation. Both story and visualisation rely on a good plot. And an abundance of those has evolved over time. Many have their own dedicated Wikipedia page!

Which generate the most interest? How is the interest in each trending over time? Try this app to find out.

The app may take a moment to load:

View full-width here.

Note the utility of selecting the right scaling. The combination of “fixed” and “normal” reveals what must have been “world histogram day” on July 27th 2015, but little else.

The need for speed

Turning non-interactive code into an app sharpens the mind’s focus on performance. And profvis, integrated into RStudio via the profile menu option, is a wonderful “tool for helping you understand how R spends its time”.

My first version of the app was finger-tappingly slow.

Profvis revealed the main culprit to be the pre-loading of a dataframe with the page-view data for all chart types (there are more than 100). Profiling prompted the more efficient “reactive” approach of loading the data only for the user’s selection (maximum of 8).

Profiling also showed that rounding the corners of the plot.background with additional grid-package code was expensive. App efficiency felt more important than minor cosmetic detailing. And most users would probably barely notice (had I not drawn attention to it here).

R toolkit

	Packages	Functions
	purrr	map_df
profvis	profvis
	pageviews	article_pageviews
rvest	read_html; html_nodes; html_text
	dplyr	mutate; select;
stringr	str_replace_all
lubridate	ymd
tibble	data_frame
	ggplot2	geom_line; geom_smooth; facet_wrap
ggthemes	theme_economist; economist_pal
shiny	fluidPage; reactive; renderPlot; shinyApp; selectInput; wellPanel; helpText; selectizeInput; titlePanel; mainPanel; plotOutput
shinythemes	shinytheme

View the code here.

Citations / Attributions

R Development Core Team (2008). R: A language and environment for
statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing,
Vienna, Austria. ISBN 3-900051-07-0, URL http://www.R-project.org.

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