Sometimes it’s useful to be able to extract data from a published figure. If the figure isn’t a vector based format (for which the numeric data is probably still in the file), it’s possible to digitize the image with R, click the points and extract it that ...

I just came across a nice little post on acquiring and visualizing geodata in R using the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology as an example. It’s by the rOpenSci guys. Some useful code in there by the look of it… ? Worth a look…

Just a little fun today… the R console isn’t the most interesting of things… text is typically either black or red (assuming default settings in RStudio). There’s a package though called crayon which allows one to change the style of text in terms of colour, background and some ...

If you don’t know rOpenSci, then I recommend checking them out. They write a lot of really good packages for R. A relatively new seems to be drake. I’ve not played with it yet, but it looks to be very useful at giving indications about which parts of ...

Histograms are good, density plots are also good. Violin and bean plots too. Recently I had someone ask for a plot where you could see each individual point along a continuum, give the points specific colours based on a second variable (similar to the figure), which deviates somewhat from the ...

I’m sure there’s a better way out there, but I struggled to find a way to dissolve polygons that touched/overlapped each other (the special case being buffers). For example,  using the osmdata package, we can download the polygons representing hospital buildings in Bern, Switzerland. library(osmdata) library(...

R is a great program for generating top-notch graphics. But to get the best out of it, you need to put in a little more work. Here are a few tips for adapting your R graphics to make them look a little better. 1) Dont use the “File/Save as…/” menu. ...

The openrouteservice provides a new method to get geodata into R. It has an API (or a set of them) and an R package has been written to communicate with said API(s) and is available from GitHub. I’ve just been playing around with the examples on this page, ...

These two functions are unbelievably useful for positioning graphical elements (text, axes, labels, …) in R. They allow one to convert coordinates between various different formats. For instance, you can convert your user coordinate (say 5 where x ranges from 0 to 200) to normalized device coordinates (proportional distance across the device) and vice ...

Flow charts are an important part of a clinical trial report. Making them can be a pain though. One good way to do it seems to be with the grid and Gmisc packages in R. X and Y coordinates can be designated based on the center of the boxes in ...