A few months ago, I finally got a chance to see The Imitation Game (the new Alan Turing movie), which gave me an idea for a Sunday morning R hacking session. The movie features a bunch of scenes with bustling rooms full or workers intercepting (and documenting) encrypted radio transmissions, ... [Read more...]

Several months ago, I found Bryan Povlinkski's (really nicely cleaned) dataset with 2013 NFL play-by-play information, based on data released by Brian Burke at Advanced Football Analytics. I decided to browse QB completion rates based on Pass Location (Left, Middle, Right), Pass Distance (Short or Deep), and Down. I ended up ... [Read more...]

On Friday, I saw David Smith's post on a competition to design this year's useR! conference t-shirt. The goal is to create a design generated using an R script, which will be featured on the back of the shirt. Having a bit of time this weekend, I decided to try ... [Read more...]

I've lost about 100 hours over the past week to the black hole of 2048. In an attempt to extricate myself, I thought I'd try writing an R script to play for me. While there are already a ton of great algorithms for the game, I haven't seen any implemented in R. ... [Read more...]

I've been a big fan of rbloggers for quite some time, but have only recently started contributing myself. After my first post yesterday, I immidiately started wondering how long most other bloggers go between posts. I decided to gather the list of past posts to rbloggers to investigate a bit. ... [Read more...]

A funny thing about social media in the 21st century is that it allows us to connect with a lot of people.. by a lot, I mean so many that it's easy to lose track of any sense of scale. Maybe others are better at this, but I have a ... [Read more...]

Interested in practicing a bit of web-scraping, I decided to make use of a nice dataset provided by Databasebasketball.com in order to examine the representation of various college programs in the NBA/ABA over time. This dataset only includes retired players, and ends in 2010, so I decided to only ... [Read more...]

I've been exploring Jeff Gentry's twitteR package, which has a ton of great functionality for intereacting with twitter data in R. Today, I thought a bit about a problem I've noticed several times on twitter: users profiles are often only noisy signals of the content they tweet about! I decided ... [Read more...]

Piet Mondrian Composition with Red, Blue, Black, Yellow, and Gray (1921): An example draw from my simulation function: We're in the midst of planning our spring course on Empirical Research Methods, and as a result, I've found myself spending a lot of time thinking about some of the fist ideas in ... [Read more...]

## geom_smooth: method="auto" and size of largest group is <1000, so using<br>## loess. Use 'method = x' to change the smoothing method.<br>

I remember my dad telling me that when he was at Northwestern in the mid-70s, the team was essentially winless. As a small consolation, he remembered that the football team had actually been full of good students. Some time ago, I stumbled across nflcombineresults.com. Among other measures, ... [Read more...]

A friend of mine, who's an economics teacher in London, is responsible for preparing some of his students for interviews at Oxford and Cambridge. He told me that, at these schools, students have to go through a nerve-wracking experience where faculty pepper them with quiz questions meant to assess the ... [Read more...]

Exploring Gaussian Mixture Models Exploring Gaussian Mixture Models This week in the Empirical Research Methods course, we've been talking a lot about measurement error. The idea of having some latent variable of interest, coupled with 'flawed' measures reminded me of a section of Cosma's course I really enjoyed, but haven't ... [Read more...]

Short: I plot the frequency of wikipedia searches of “Behavioral Economics”, and “Beer” – who knew the correlation would be 0.7! Data reference:Data on any wikipedia searches (back to 2007) are available at http://glimmer.rstudio.com/pssguy/wikiSearchRates/. The website allows you to download frequency hits per day as a csv, ... [Read more...]

Short: I plot the frequency of college hockey championships by state using the maps package, and ggplot2 Note: this example is based heavily on the example provided athttp://www.dataincolour.com/2011/07/maps-with-ggplot2/ data reference:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCAA_Men%27s_Ice_Hockey_Championship Question of interestAs a good ... [Read more...]

Top Batting Averages Over Time Top Batting Averages Over Time reference:http://www.baseball-databank.org/ ShortI'm going to use plyr and ggplot2 to look at how top batting averages have changed over time First load the data:

options(width = 100)<br>library(ggplot2)<br>

## Warning message: package 'ggplot2' was built under R version 2.14.2<br>

library(plyr)<br><br>data(baseball)<br>head(baseball)<br>

##            id year stint team lg  g  ab  r  h X2b X3b hr rbi sb cs bb so ibb hbp sh sf gidp<br>## 4   ansonca01 1871     1  RC1    25 120 29 39  11   3  0  16  6  2  2  1  NA  NA NA NA   NA<br>## 44  forceda01 1871     1  WS3    32 162 45 45   9   4  0  29  8  0  4  0  NA  NA NA NA   NA<br>## 68  mathebo01 1871     1  FW1    19  89 15 24   3   1  0  10  2  1  2  0  NA  NA NA NA   NA<br>## 99  startjo01 1871     1  NY2    33 161 35 58   5   1  1  34  4  2  3  0  NA  NA NA NA   NA<br>## 102 suttoez01 1871     1  CL1    29 128 35 45   3   7  3  23  3  1  1  0  NA  NA NA NA   NA<br>## 106 whitede01 1871     1  CL1    29 146 40 47   6   5  1  21  2  2  4  1  NA  NA NA NA   NA<br>

It looks like we've loaded the data successfully. Next, ... [Read more...]