Great news R pirates! The yarrr package, which contains the pirateplot, has now been updated to version 0.0.8 and is up on CRAN (after hiding in plain sight on GitHub). Let’s install the latest version (0.0.8) and go over some of the updates: The most important function in the yarrr package ... [Read more...]

“…[W]e are suspicious of rapid cognition. We live in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it” Malcom Gladwell, Blink In his book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell summarises a common misconception about good decision making. ... [Read more...]

Hello fellow R pirates! For those of you who didn’t see it, I recently wrote a post demonstrating the pirateplot() function in the yarrr package. The pirateplot() function replaces the deceptive (and boring) bar plot with a full RDI plot, capable of plotting Raw data (and smoothed densities), Descriptive ... [Read more...]

  Plain vanilla barplots are as uninformative (and ugly) as they are popular. And boy, are they popular. From the floors of congress, to our latest scientific articles, barplots surround us. The reason why barplots are so popular is because they are so simple and easy to understand. However, that simplicity ... [Read more...]

One of the most common types of datasets people want to plot is one where there is a continuous dependent variable – like age, company profit, or beard length – as a function of a categorical independent variable – like gender, a specific company, or one’s pirate ship. Unfortunately, despite the vast ... [Read more...]

I missed out on www.yarrr.com (some domain squatter is holding it for a pirate’s ransom), but I was able to snag www.thepiratesguidetor.com! This is now the official home of YaRrr! The Pirate’s Guide to R For those of you who don’t know, this ... [Read more...]

When most people think about R, they think of statistics. They don’t think of horror films. I’m here to change that. Let’s back up. While R is certainly one of the top two (I’m looking over my back at you Python) languages for statistical analysis, it’... [Read more...]

A brief tutorial on ML estimation in R Recently, a colleague asked me to demonstrate how one can calculate maximum-likelihood (ML) parameter estimates in R. As I had been meaning to do this for my R course anyway, I decided to write up the following brief tutorial. In the tutorial, ... [Read more...]

  If you’ve spent more than 30 minutes with me, you probably know that I’m a bit of an R fanatic. When I meet someone doing analytical work who uses software like Excel or SPSS, I inevitably go into my “R Salesman” mode. Unfortunately, after I spend 10-30 minutes trying ... [Read more...]

Shiny Link: https://ndphillips.shinyapps.io/Visual_Resume/ How much do I love R? Enough that I maintain several ‘fun R’ projects. One of my favorites is my Visual Resume generator – which creates an individualised visual resume based on a person’s education and job history (and publications and research ... [Read more...]

What if I told you there was a new drug that has been proven to DOUBLE your changes of getting over a cough? Sounds great doesn’t it? Well, before we (ahem) cough up the dough for drug X, let’s take a closer look at the clinical trial data: ... [Read more...]

Well, after talking about it for about a year now, I’ve finally started converting my R course to a YouTube friendly format. Since I’m in the middle of my university R course, the videos don’t quite start at the beginning. I’ll add the beginning 3-5 lectures ... [Read more...]

Here’s a quick example of how the dplyr package can dramatically improve your code for organising and manipulating dataframes [RPubs]   [Read more...]

  I frequently find myself thinking of the best way to convince an SPSS user to make the switch to R. In the process, I came up with the three following most common objections by SPSS users and my responses.   Objection #1) I can’t use R because I don’t know ... [Read more...]