Something that's very important to be able to do in data analysis and visualization is to filter out cases. Let's say you want to do identical analyses of two different groups, or of one group and then a subset of it. R can do this a little differently; instead of ... [Read more...]

Before we delve into slightly more advanced plotting commands I want to talk a little about linear models, specifically, linear regression. In R this is very, very simple. For instance, in our 'states' data frame, we might want to look at median household income as a predictor of state education ... [Read more...]

Using Microsoft Excel I'm collecting aggregate data, by state, of various social, political, and economic indicators. I export them into a tab-delimited file called 'states.txt' (pretty clever, I know.) I've got data on education expenditures, firearm deaths per capita, median household income, etc. I'd like to do some analysis ... [Read more...]

I've decided that this summer I will finally break down and force myself to learn a little bit about using R. I currently use Stata, a very good program, but the idea of R is appealing since it's free under the GNU license. It has a large and active us... [Read more...]