Firstly, I know nothing about election fraud – this isn’t a serious post. But, I do like to do some simple coding. Ben Goldacre posted on using Benford’s Law to look for evidence of Russian election fraud. Then Richie Cotton did the same, but using R. Commenters on both ... [Read more...]

Please note - I’ve spotted a problem with the approach taken in this post – it seems to underestimate power in certain circumstances. I’ll post again with a correction or a more full explanation when I’ve sorted it. So, I posted an answer on cross validation regarding logistic ... [Read more...]

This post is not about R (for a change). For working UK scientists, science is vital – sign the on-line petition to preserve science funding. For my contribution of what we don’t know yet - We don’t know whether we can use biomarkers of kidney injury to personalise the ... [Read more...]

So, there’s probably an easier way to do this (please let me know if you know it)… Suppose you’re working with a system which creates (binary) files and posts them for download on a website. You know the names of the files that will be created. However, they ... [Read more...]

If you’ve read any of my previous posts, you’ll notice that they’re rather scanty on colour. There’s a reason for this. Mainly, that to get a good colour output takes some time. I recently read a commentary in Nature methods (sorry if you don’t have ... [Read more...]

So, when you first look at some data, it’s helpful to get a feel of it. One way to do this is to do a plot or two. I’ve found myself continuously doing the same series of plots for different datasets, so in the end I wrote this ... [Read more...]

In this previous post, we’ve looked at displaying three dimensional data.  One major problem is when there is a high density of data, it can be difficult to see what’s going on in a 3 dimensional plot. One way of looking at the data in more detail is to ... [Read more...]

Some charts are to help you analyse data. Some charts are to wow people. 3d charts are often the latter, but occasionally the former. In this post, we’ll look at how to turn your data into a 3d chart. Let’s use the data from this previous post. Use ... [Read more...]

R can produce some beautiful graphics, and there are some excellent packages, such as lattice and ggplot2 to represent data in original ways.  But sometimes, all you want to do is explore the realtionship between pairs of variables with the minimum of fuss. In this post we’ll use the ... [Read more...]

In this post we will build on the last one, and create a matrix scatterplot. The package lattice allows for some really excellent graphics. In case you haven’t already seen it I recommend the R Graph Gallery for some examples of what it can do – browse the graphics by ... [Read more...]

The most difficult part of the learning curve in R is often getting going – many datasets are pre-installed in the packages and organised, so it is difficult to see how you to import your own data into R.  This post takes you step by step through the process of making ... [Read more...]

Welcome to Gosset’s student, a blog about statistics, with a focus on using R.  We’re all learning R, as it’s constantly being improved.  The blog will aim for brevity, and a focussed approach to getting some stats done, rather than elegance of code.  Discussions which show how ... [Read more...]