One of the problems with working with data files containing tens of thousands (or more) rows is that they can become unwieldy, if not impossible, to use with “everyday” desktop tools. When I was Revisiting MPs’ Expenses, the expenses data I downloaded from IPSA (the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority) came ... [Read more...]

I couldn’t but notice the chatter about Iain Duncan Smith claiming he’d have no problem “living on 53 pounds a dayweek“, which made me wonder not only how many meal catered events he attends each week (and how many of his scheduled meeting also have complementary tea and biscuits (... [Read more...]

How can stats and data publishers, from NGOs and (inter)national statistics agencies to scientific researchers, publish their data in a way that supports its analysis directly, as well as in combination with other datasets? Here’s one approach I learned about from Michael Kao of the UN Food and ... [Read more...]

Following a chat with @andypryke, I thought I’d try out a simple bit of feature detection around approximated follower acquisition charts (e.g. Estimated Follower Accession Charts for Twitter) to see if I could detect dates around which there were spikes in follower acquisition. So for example, here’s ... [Read more...]

I’ve been doodling… Following a query about the possible purchase of Twitter followers for various public figure accounts (I need to get my head round what the problem is with that exactly?!), I thought I’d have a quick look at some stats around follower groupings… I started off ... [Read more...]

As the food labeling and substituted horsemeat saga rolls on, I’ve been surprised at how little use has been made of “data” to put the structure of the food chain into some sort of context* (or maybe I’ve just missed those stories?). One place that can almost always ... [Read more...]

Following directly on from F1Stats – Visually Comparing Qualifying and Grid Positions with Race Classification, and continuing in my attempt to replicate some of the methodology and results used in A Tale of Two Motorsports: A Graphical-Statistical Analysis of How Practice, Qualifying, and Past SuccessRelate to Finish Position in NASCAR ... [Read more...]

A handful of open Linked Data have appeared through my feeds in the last couple of days, including (via RBloggers) SPARQL with R in less than 5 minutes, which shows how to query US data.gov Linked Data and then Leigh Dodds’ Brief Review of the Land Registry Linked Data. I ... [Read more...]

[If this isn't your thing, the posts in this thread will be moving to a new blog soon, rather than taking over OUseful.info...] Following the roundabout tour of F1Stats – A Prequel to Getting Started With Rank Correlations, here’s a walk through of my attempt to replicate the ... [Read more...]

As part of my “learn about Formula One Stats” journey, one of the things I wanted to explore was how F1 betting odds change over the course of a race weekend, along with how well they predict race weekend outcomes. Courtesy of @flutterF1, I managed to get a peek of ... [Read more...]

Another preparatory step before I start learning about stats in the context of Formula One… There are a couple of things I’m hoping to achieve when I actually start the journey: 1) finding ways of using stats to help to pull out patterns and events that are interesting from a ... [Read more...]

One of the many things I keep avoiding is statistics. I’ve never really been convinced about the 5% significance level thing; as far as I can tell, hardly anything that’s interesting normally distributes; all the counting that’s involved just confuses me; and I never really got to grips ... [Read more...]

A trackback from Martin Hawksey’s recent post on Analysing WordPress post velocity and momentum stats with Google Sheets (Spreadsheet), which demonstrates how to pull WordPress stats into a Google Spreadsheet and generates charts and reports therein, reminded me of the WordPress stats API. So here’s a quick function ... [Read more...]

Having got my NHS Winter sitrep data scraper into shape (I think!), and dabbled with a quick Shiny demo using the R/Shiny library, I thought I’d tidy it up a little over the weekend and long the way learn a few new presentation tricks. To quickly recap the ... [Read more...]

The launch or official opening or whatever it was of the Open Data Institute this week provided another chance to grab a snapshot of notable folk in the community, as for example demonstrated by people commonly followed by users of the #ODIlaunch hashtag on Twitter. The PR campaign also resulted ... [Read more...]

I had a bit of a play with Shiny over the weekend, using the Ergast Motor Racing Data API and the magical Shiny library for R, that makes building interactive, browser based applications around R a breeze. As this is just a quick heads-up/review post, I’ll largely limit ... [Read more...]

Having spent a chink of the weekend and a piece of yesterday trying to pull NHS Winter sitrep data into some sort of shape in Scraperwiki, (described, in part, here: When Machine Readable Data Still Causes “Issues” – Wrangling Dates…), I couldn’t but help myself last night and had a ... [Read more...]

In Paths to the F1 2012 Championship Based on How They Might Finish in the US Grand Prix I posted a quick hack to calculate the finishing positions that would determine the F1 2012 Drivers’ Championship in today’s United States Grand Prix, leaving a tease dangling around the possibility of working ... [Read more...]

In part inspired by the chart described in The electoral map sans the map, I thought I’d start mulling over a quick sketch showing the race to the 2012 Formula One Drivers’ Championship. The chart needs to show tension somehow, so in this first really quick and simple rough sketch, ... [Read more...]

This is another of those confluence style posts, where a handful of things I’ve read in quick succession seem to phase lock in my mind: (brought to mind in part via @downes a week or so ago: How to Synch 32 Metronomes) The first was a post by Alan Levine ... [Read more...]