To many people, R is like the Everglades. They’ve heard of it, they know it’s big and has amazing treasures deep inside. Articles in the media can make it look irresistible. But after a personal or even second hand experience …  &#16... [Read more...]

This program takes a data set of drug utilisation of 4 fictional drugs in 10 fictional hospitals and plots each time-series with a locally weighted regression (Lowess) trend line. It also places an time-series trend of the usage for each … Continue reading → [Read more...]

For the past 18 months, it seems like all I’ve heard about in the digital marketing industry is “big data”, and with that, mentions of using Hadoop and R to solve these sorts of problems.  Why are these tools the … Continue reading →Learning R has really made me appreciate SAS ... [Read more...]

This past week for work I had to create some plots to show the max, min, and median of a measure across the levels of a qualitative variable, and show the max and min of the same variable within a … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Usually, I like to write about the solutions to problems I’ve had, but today I only have a problem to write about. This is the second research job I’ve had outside of academia, and in both cases I’ve met with … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Ever since I started using ggplot2 more often at work in order to do graphs, I’ve realized something about the use of colour in bar graphs vs. dot plots: When I’m looking at a graph displayed on the brilliant Viewsonic … Continue reading → [Read more...]

The main reason why I have usually chosen to use excel to make my plots at work is because I had difficulty feeding the summary stats in R into a plotting function.  One thing I learned this week is how … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Last week, I read a chapter out of Visualize This by Nathan Yau.  I was, of course, delighted to see that he was championing the use of R.  One really cool thing that I learned from his book, and was very … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Are statistics sexy? Visualising social networks certainly is! I wrote a little function, which makes producing beautiful plots depicting a mailbox with R an extremely easy task. I find visualisations of ‘social graphs’ particularly appealing. They look like flowers. I … 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...]

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Here is how to improve your charts, graphs, maps, and plots: Erase non-data ink. Erase redundant data ink. Maximize the ratio of data to ink. Show data variation, not design variation. The surface area of graphical elements should be directly proportio... [Read more...]

After a month of on-again, off-again coding, I’ve finally completed a web site geared towards calculating the Value at Risk of the average investor’s portfolio. The site is visualvar.com. The big idea was to combine the statistical and visualization tools of R (especially ggplot2) with the web ... [Read more...]

I've spent some more time thinking about how best to put together the package for creating web-friendly, interactive data visualizations in R. I have a pretty substantial JavaScript package that does a lot of basic visualizations now, and it's really exciting to see where this is going. With this in ... [Read more...]

After finishing the R prototype for data visualization, I've started abstracting the various methods necessary to create beautiful graphs. While there's no preliminary version of the R package yet, I think I've taken a number of exciting steps. These include: Abstracting graph objects. Objects such as lines, scatter plots, and ... [Read more...]

Developing web-friendly data visualizations is not very difficult, though as far as I know, a package that allows one to do this directly in R does not exist (e-mail me if you know of one). As someone who has been developing lots of data-oriented software tools, it's always nice to ... [Read more...]

Download "Getting Started with the Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit" (pdf, 1.25 megabytes) Download the Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit My Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit is about to move into private beta. What's in the release?... [Read more...]

Download "Getting Started with the Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit" (pdf, 1.25 megabytes) Download the Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit How The Chart Was Made Whenever a Twitter user posts a tweet, an object is created and entered into t... [Read more...]

Download "Getting Started with the Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit" (pdf, 1.25 megabytes) Download the Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit Thanks to Drew Conway (@drewconway), a PhD student at New York University, there are now eight excell... [Read more...]

Download "Getting Started with the Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit" (pdf, 1.25 megabytes) Download the Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit Disclosure As you probably know, I live in the Portland, Oregon area and have for many years. One of ... [Read more...]