I was working on a project yesterday where I needed to amortize out a bunch of loans to calculate the total interest a borrower would pay if he or she paid the minimum monthly payment for the full term of the loan. I couldn’t find any package in R ... [Read more...]

I wrote a couple days about about importing Excel files into R. There are lots of ways to do this, but all the ways that use only R have drawbacks (as I outlined in my last post), and all the other ways require installation of programs other than R. I’... [Read more...]

I suppose most companies use the Microsoft Office suite of programs, and my office is no exception. It easy to import data from an API or a database into R, but importing data from an Excel workbook is a different story. There are a few R packages for reading Excel ... [Read more...]

I’ve been writing lately on what to do when people who make decisions in an organization say they want data-driven capabilities but then ignore or attack the results of data-driven analysis for not saying what they think the data ought to say. Some of the most productive things you ... [Read more...]

My previous post on how to transform an organization into a more data-driven version of itself made a pretty big assumption that often doesn’t hold true. I assumed that people in the organization wanted their company or agency to become more data-driven. I think almost everyone says they want ... [Read more...]

Around two years ago, I suddenly realized my statistical training had a great big Bayes-shaped hole in it. My formal education in statistics was pretty narrow – I got my degree in anthropology, a discipline not exactly known for its rigorously systematic analytic methods. I learned the basics of linear models ... [Read more...]

I became interested in sentiment analysis a few months ago as a matter of pure practicality. The company I work for does a lot of customer-satisfaction surveys. Respondents rate various aspects of our products, but they also have the opportunity to answer a bunch of open-ended questions in their own ... [Read more...]

[UPDATE: I just wrapped AspellCheck() in a llply/laply wrapper from Hadley Wickham's `plyr` package, so now it can be run on a vector of texts as well as a single character string, and it now has a default progress bar (set progress = "none" to turn it off). But you ... [Read more...]

In my previous post, I wrote about ways scale choice could distort the ways survey results portray the things they are supposed to measure. This certainly isn’t a new issue – researchers who use surveys often go to great lengths to ensure that their surveys are valid and reliable, which ... [Read more...]

This is a long post. My previous posts have mostly been about my thoughts on various research subjects. This one reports an actual analysis. If you don’t want to read the whole thing, here are the highlights: We really need to stop using surveys so much. If we have ... [Read more...]