Carson Sievert and Kenny Shirley have put together the really nice LDAvis R package. It provides a Shiny-based interactive interface for exploring the output from Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic models. If you've never used it, I highly recommend checking out their XKCD example (this paper also has some nice background). ... [Read more...]

A few months ago I posted the script that I use to set up my R/JAGS working environment on an Amazon EC2 instance.Since then I've largely transitioned to using R/Stan to estimate my models. So, I've updated my setup script (see below). There are a few... [Read more...]

Reproducibility has come a long way in political science since I began my PhD all the way back in 2008. Many major journals now require replication materials be made available either on their websites or some service such as the Dataverse Network.This ... [Read more...]

Note to self: after updating R with Homebrew remember to cleanup old versions: brew cleanup r Otherwise I'm liable to get a segfault. (see also) [Read more...]

Just wanted to put up the script I've been using to create an Amazon EC2 Ubuntu instance for running RStudio, Git, and Jags. There isn't anything really new in here, but it it has been serving me well. The script begins after the basic instance has bee... [Read more...]

Over the past few months I’ve added a few improvements to the repmis–miscellaneous functions for reproducible research–R package. I just want to briefly highlight two of them: Caching downloaded data sets. source_XlsxData for downloading data in Excel formatted files. Both of these capabilities are in repmis ... [Read more...]

After some delay (and because of helpful prompting by Giles Heywood and code contributions by John Harrison) d3Network now plays nicely with Shiny web apps. This means you can fully integrate R/D3.js network graphs into your web apps. Here is what one ... [Read more...]

A lot of progress has been made on improving political scientists’ ability to access data ‘programmatically’, e.g. data can be downloaded with source code R. Packages such as WDI for World Bank Development Indicator and dvn for many data sets stored on the Dataverse Network make it much easier ... [Read more...]

As I go about cleaning and merging data sets with R I often end up creating and using simple functions over and over. When this happens, I stick them in the DataCombine package. This makes it easier for me to remember how to do an operation and others can possibly ... [Read more...]

Effectively showing estimates and uncertainty from Cox Proportional Hazard (PH) models, especially for interactive and non-linear effects, can be challenging with currently available software. So, researchers often just simply display a results table. These are pretty useless for Cox PH models. It is difficult to decipher a simple linear variable’... [Read more...]

I've written in a number of places about how GitHub can be a great place to store data. Unlike basically all other web data storage sites (many of which I really like such as Dataverse and FigShare) GitHub enables deep social data set development and f... [Read more...]

[This article was first published on Christopher Gandrud (간드루드 크리스토파), and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on [Read more...]

Sometimes I just want to quickly make a simple D3 JavaScript directed network graph with data in R. Because D3 network graphs can be manipulated in the browser–i.e. nodes can be moved around and highlighted–they're really nice for data exploration. They're also really nice in HTML presentations. ... [Read more...]

I often want to quickly create a lag or lead variable in an R data frame. Sometimes I also want to create the lag or lead variable for different groups in a data frame, for example, if I want to lag GDP for each country in a data frame. I've ... [Read more...]

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I'm always looking for ways to download data from the internet into R. Though I prefer to host and access plain-text data sets (CSV is my personal favourite) from GitHub (see my short paper on the topic) sometimes it's convenient to get data stored on Dropbox. There has been a ... [Read more...]

Sometimes I want to use R to fill in values that are missing in one data frame with values from another. For example, I have data from the World Bank on government deficits. However, there are some country-years with missing data. I gathered data from ... [Read more...]

A big problem in reproducible research is that software changes. The code you used to do a piece of research may depend on a specific version of software that has since been changed. This is an annoying problem in R because install.packages only installs the most recent version of ... [Read more...]

I've started to put together an R package called repmis. It has miscellaneous tools for reproducible research with R. The idea behind the package is to collate commands that simplify some of the common R code used within knitr-type reproducible research papers. It's still very much in the early stages ... [Read more...]

Update 31 January: I've folded source_GitHubData into the repmis packaged. See this post. Update 7 January 2012: I updated the internal workings of source_GitHubData so that it now relies on httr rather than RCurl. Also it is more directly descended ... [Read more...]