A select few posts from 2013Rstudio's Shiny enabled me to try out ideas on the Web.WeatherCompareshinySketchEscherPlotMovieRatings ** Creating MazesThe most visitors came from these two posts:The hottest areas in CS for 2013 - per Google Research grant... [Read more...]

This year, the world chess championship will be played between Vishwanathan Anand and 22-yo Magnus Carlsen, in Chennai, India from the 9th to the 28th of November. The passions are sure to run strong. Both GMs have ardent supporters. Carlsen is in a dr... [Read more...]

The Karpov vs. Kasparov rivalry holds a special place in the chess world.The idea behind this analysis is simple. If we take their lifetime games, plot the wins, what would it look like? We introduce one twist -- we'll be plotting the "winner-take-all"... [Read more...]

What are some of the hottest areas of research in Computer Science at the moment (August 2013)? And at which universities is this research being carried out?The answers are subjective by definition, but looking at the numbers behind the Google Research... [Read more...]

One big strength of packages like shiny is the ability to easily vary parameters and view the results, especially in plots.So here’s a small shiny app that I created to learn about reactivity, while also having fun.The idea is simple. Vary many aspects of geom_segments in ... [Read more...]

Using R and Integer Programming to find solutions to FlowFree game boards What is FlowFree?A popular game (iOS/Android) on a square board with simple rules. As the website states: Connect matching colors with pipes to create a flow. Pair all color... [Read more...]

This post is targeted at those who are just getting started plotting on maps using R.The relevant libraries are: maps, ggplot2, ggmap, and maptools. Make sure you install them.The Problem Let's take a fairly simple use case: We have a few points on the... [Read more...]

This post is intended at those who are beginners at R, and is inspired by a small post in Martin's bioblog.First, we plot a "correlation heatmap" using the same logic that Martin uses. In our example, let's use the Movies dataset that comes with ggplot... [Read more...]

This is intended for those who are starting out in R and interested in parsing an XML document recursively. It uses DT Lang's XML package.If you want to just read certain types of nodes, then XPATH is great. This document by DT Lang is perfect for that... [Read more...]

This post is inspired by the Week 7 lectures of the Coursera course "Introduction to Genetics and Evolution" (I highly recommend this course for anyone interested in genetics, BTW.) Professor Noor uses a Univ Washington software called AlleleA1 for try... [Read more...]

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So what should be in the toolkit of people who call themselves a data scientist?A fundamental skill is the ability to manipulate data. A data scientist should be familiar and comfortable with a number of platforms and scripting tools to get the job don... [Read more...]

It is not as if I don't have enough books (and material on the web) to read. But this list compiled by the O'Reilly team should make any data analyst salivate.http://shop.oreilly.com/category/deals/data-science-kit.doThe Books and Video included in the... [Read more...]

Ever since I heard about Kaggle.com at this year's Bay Area Data Mining Camp, I've wanted to participate. But I was feeling somewhat intimidated. Jeremy Howard's "Intro to Kaggle" talk at yesterday's MeetUp (DataMining for a Cause) was exactly what I... [Read more...]

Google's Fusion Tables look impressive, for those who want to try geo-visualizations of their data. You don't need much programming experience to be able to use it.For those who want to try it out, here's a nice intro that Kathyrn Hurley presented at the recent SVCC (Silicon Valley Code ... [Read more...]

I am always looking for suggestions on how to get better at R, esp. for beginners. So when I see someone who's gotten adept at it, I ask them how they got there.This weekend, at the Bay Area ACM Data Mining Camp, one person gave me what seemed like ... [Read more...]

I found this great R-Visualization example via an R-Blogger post that xingmowang made. (One more good reason for why it is important to read lots of field-related blogs!)Here's the image:If this was merely eye-candy, I would have enjoyed it, but not in... [Read more...]

To me, this post by Christophe Ladroue personifies what data doodlers do.They take a dataset that is of interest to them (In his case, his triathlon results) and then they manipulate the numbers to see what insights can be drawn. Most bloggers only sho... [Read more...]

Check out this talk by John Rauser of AMZN at the 2011 Strata Conf. It is an excellent intro to the field. [Read more...]

Data mining is not only statistics, even if statistics is the most recognized academic component of it. It also includes data cleaning, machine learning and data visualization. The scarce factor is the ability to understand that data and extract value ... [Read more...]