Having recently shared my post about defensive programming in R on the r/rstats subreddit, I was blown away by the sheer number of comments as much as I was blown away by the insight many displayed. One particular comment by u/guepier struck my attention. In my previous post, ...

When you think of R, defensive coding may not be your first thought. But writing code that fails well & is easy to debug is more important than you'd think. The post The Ten Rules of Defensive Programming in R appeared first on Doodling in Data.

Have you ever wanted to schedule tasks from R and run routine analytics repeatedly at regular intervals? Here's the best way to do it. The post Automagic epi curve plotting: part I appeared first on Doodling in Data.

A quick guide on setting up your own RStudio server on a Linode or other Debian-based UNIX server. The post Installing RStudio Server on Debian 9 appeared first on Doodling in Data.

Update: an RMarkdown notebook explaining the whole process is available here. Visualising vaccine safety is hard. Doing so from passive (or, as we say it in Britain, ‘spontaneous’!) pharmacovigilance (PhV) sources is even harder. Unlike in active or trial pharmacovigilance, where you are essentially dividing the number of incidents by ...

I have been carrying my Fitbit One for a little over two years with me and it keeps tracking my daily steps. It also tracks my distance covered by multiplying those steps using the stride length which you can either provide explicitly or implicitly setting your heights. In the winter ...

I have been tracking my sleep for almost two years now using my Fitbit. I started with the Fitbit Ultra and then moved on the the Fitbit One after it came out. In October 2013 I found out about the Sleep Cycle (Link) app for the iPhone. For weeks, Sleep Cycle ...

After the 2013 Berlin Marathon sold out in less than four hours, the organizers decided to alter the registration process for 2014. First there was a pre-registration phase followed by a random selection from the pool of registrants to receive a spot. Those who were selected had to register until November 11th, 2013. ...

After I moved back from New Jersey in June 2008 I started to track my body weight more seriously. My routine usually consists of getting up and after finishing the morning bathroom I would step on my scale. That way I try to ensure that the condition for each weighing are ...

Pairs of categorical data The grades data.frame holds two columns of letter grades, giving pairs of categorical data, like so: prev grade 1 B+ B+ 2 A- A- 3 B+ A- ... 122 B B This type of data can be summarized by the tab...

I'm working my way through Using R for Introductory Statistics, by John Verzani, a free version of which is available as SimpleR. Chapter 1 ...covers basics of R such as arithmetic, loading libraries and reading data. We also get an introduction to v...

R is a weird beast. Through it's ancestor the S language, it claims a proud heritage reaching back to Bell Labs in the 1970's when S was created as an interactive wrapper around a set of statistical and numerical subroutines. As a programming language,...

A common data-munging operation is to compute cross tabulations of measurements by categories. SQL Server and Excel have a nice feature called pivot tables for this purpose. Here we'll figure out how to do pivot operations in R.Let's imagine an experim...

The R statistical computing environment is awesome, but weird. How to do database operations in R is a common source of questions. The other day I was looking for an equivalent to SQL group by for R data frames. You need this to compute summary statist...

Want to join two R data frames on a common key? Here's one way do a SQL database style join operation in R.We start with a data frame describing probes on a microarray. The key is the probe_id and the rest of the information describes the location on ...

The R language is weird - particularly for those coming from a typical programmer's background, which likely includes OO languages in the curly-brace family and relational databases using SQL. A key data structure in R, the data.frame, is used somethin...