???? TL;DR We built an R Shiny app to improve access to information on Hong Kong’s local politicians. This is so that voters can make more informed choices. The app shows basic information on each politician, alongside a live feed of their Facebook ...

Background I’ve always found it a bit of a pain to explore and choose from all the different themes available out there for {ggplot2}. Yes I know, I know - there are probably tons of websites out there with a ggplot theme gallery which I can Google,1 but it’...

Background One of the motives for starting the Data Chats interview series was to shed light on the many ways in which data and analytics professionals operate across different fields and cultures. Previously, Avision Ho (Senior Data Scientist at t...

Introduction ???????????? This post provides a basic introduction on how to use RStudio Projects and structure your working directories - which is well worth a read if you are still using setwd() to set your directories! Although the R working direct...

Background In an earlier post April this year, I discussed using flexdashboard (with RMarkdown) as an appealing and practical R alternative to Excel-based reporting dashboards. Since it’s possible to (i) export these ‘flexdashboards’ as static HTML files that can be opened on practically any computer (virtually no dependencies), (ii) ...

Background Google Trends is a well-known, free tool provided by Google that allows you to analyse the popularity of top search queries on its Google search engine. In market exploration work, we often use Google Trends to get a very quick view of what behaviours, language, and general things are ...

RMarkdown is awesome! When I first started using RMarkdown, it felt very much like a blessing. Not only does the format encourage reproducible analysis by enabling you to interweave code, text, images, and plots, it also allows you to knit() the docu...

Introduction How do you begin a career in analytics and data science? What’s the best way of learning R? Should I still bother with Excel? Arguably, these are some questions that you can gain more insights on by speaking to people than running mode...

Meeting Hadley! Last Monday, I had the pleasure of attending a talk given by Hadley Wickham at LondonR, which was held at one of their usual venues at the UCL Darwin Lecture Theatre. For most readers of this blog, Hadley needs no introduction: it is...

Introduction Why do an interview? On this occasion, I’ve decided to have a conversation with a data scientist for a change, as opposed to creating a vignette or reviewing a package (atypical of the content on this blog). I’ve always enjoyed int...

Organic Development of R Artefacts In a previous post, I alluded to the point that one of the great strengths (but also one of the challenges) of R is the organic way in which R ‘artefacts’ are developed.1 One characteristic of this “organic d...

Introduction This post will show you how to write and read a list of data tables to and from Excel with purrr, the functional programming package ???? from tidyverse. In this example I will also use the packages readxl and writexl for reading and writing in Excel files, and cover methods ...

TL;DR ???? This post provides an overview of R functions for dealing with survey data labels, particularly ones that I wish I’d known when I first started out analysing survey data in R (primarily stored in SPSS data files). Some of these functions come from surveytoolbox, a package I’...

Background Anyone who has created wordclouds for a presentation before will know that it is an iterative process. Not only do you have to remove “useless” stop words (e.g. the, at, am), you may also need to process word stemming so that words with the same stem do not ...

Background One of the pet projects that I had been working on earlier in the year was to figure out an efficient way to gain an insight into what is going on in a consumer market, e.g.: What do people look for when they’re buying a product? What ...

What’s the best way to learn R? Motivations behind the debate Some argue that R fundamentally has a steep learning curve, and that there are no real shortcuts for learning R. I don’t completely agree with that: I think that there are easier way...