Here is part 2 of my guide to using ggplot2. Scales Following on directly from the previous notes you can manually adjust the colours and shapes used in the chart if you don’t like the defaults, as shown in figure 1. … Continue reading &#8... [Read more...]

During the time I have used R the base graphics package has met my needs, although I have been aware of ggplot2 but found learning it a bit of a struggle so have pretty much ignored it until now. Most … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I hate the Giants. Let this be known. What i was hoping to find was another reason to support my claim that their WS win in 2010 was a complete fluke.  So when digging through the game logs for the … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I couldn’t let this one go. The conclusion draw here by this author that Randy Johnson was “the best pitcher of all time” was not something I could allow to slip through the cracks. Johnson was awesome. Incredible to watch. … Continue reading → [Read more...]

My intuition tells me that objects traveling through the air would meet more resistance when there is more moisture in the air. It turns out that my intuition is wrong. It still doesn’t make sense to me but apparently humid … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Below is a chart of the top 20 offensive players based on FanGraphs WAR for the 2011 season.  The various features and their corresponding metric are clear in the image. I’ve also included the leader and last place for each … Continue reading → [Read more...]

While reading this article over at Fangraphs I was inspired to ask myself “what would Matt Kemp have to do between now and then end of his career to be seriously considered for the Hall of Fame?”.  This question comes … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Look at just the first digit and the number of digits. science: 32914, 11566, 4989, 3743, 968, 814, 673, 482, 286, 2811 black and white: 1694, 1167, 1108, 988, 919, 639, 596, 591, 580, 544 lol: 22627, 18100, 17688, 14374, 13459, 12045, 4711, 3779, 36... [Read more...]

(The image above is called a “Beeswarm Boxplot” , the code for producing this image is provided at the end of this post) The above plot is implemented under different names in different softwares. This “Scatter Dot Beeswarm Box Violin – plot” (in the lack of an agreed upon term) is a ... [Read more...]

HOW TO DISPLAY A LINE PLOT WITH COUNT INFORMATION? In a previously-mentioned paper Sharad and your DSN editor are writing up, there is the above line plot with points. The area of each point shows the count of observations. It’s done in R with ggplot2 (hooray for Hadley). We ... [Read more...]

CHART CRITICS, GRAPHICS CURMUDGEONS, COME ONE COME ALL Once upon a time there was this graph (graph 1). Andrew Gelman went all graphics curmudgeon on it, calling it an “ugly, sloppy bit of data graphics“, so it became this graph (graph 2). Now the question is, which is better: graph 2 or graph 3? ... [Read more...]