In Accessing and Visualising Sentencing Data for Local Courts I posted a couple of quick ways in to playing with Ministry of Justice sentencing data for the period July 2010-June 2011 at the local court level. At the end of the post, I wondered about how to wrangle the data in ... [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...]

The subset function is available in base R and can be used to return subsets of a vector, martix, or data frame which meet a particular condition. In my three years of using R, I have repeatedly used the subset() function and believe that it is the most useful tool ... [Read more...]

If part of the role of data journalism is to make transparent the justification behind claims that are, or aren’t, backed up by data, there’s good reason to suppose that the journalists should be able to back up their own data-based claims with evidence about how they made ... [Read more...]

Picking up on Paul Bradshaw’s post A quick exercise for aspiring data journalists which hints at how you can use Google Spreadsheets to grab – and explore – a mortality dataset highlighted by Ben Goldacre in DIY statistical analysis: experience the thrill of touching real data, I thought I’d describe ... [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...]

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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...]

For my first contribution to the blog, I wanted to make some kind of enlightening visualization of campaign finance disclosure data from the Federal Election Commission’s website. It looks like they’re working on some new, easy-to-use data dumps here, but … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Once you’re comfortable with 2-arrays and 2-matrices, you can move up a dimension or two, to 4-arrays or 4-tensors. You can move up to a 3-array / 3-tensor just by imagining a matrix which “extends back into the blackboard”. Like a 5 × 5 ma... [Read more...]

With data from the USDA on certified organic farms for 2008.  I created a map using the Geo Map function from the googleVis API package available in R.  I’ve copied and pasted the image below as WordPress.com sites don’t support … Continue reading → [Read more...]

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The following script simulates a craps game in R any number of iterations with any starting amount of cash and any maximum odds and running until the user is out of cash.  It assumes a specific betting strategy as explained … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I couldn’t contain myself (other more pressing things to do, but…), so I just took a quick time out and a coffee to put together a quick and dirty R function that will let me run queries over Google spreadsheet data sources and essentially treat them as database tables (... [Read more...]

As September draws nearer, my mind inevitably turns away from my lofty (and largely unmet) summer research goals, and toward teaching.  This semester I will be trying out a teaching technique using live data collection and analysis as a tool to encourage student engagement.  The idea is based on the ... [Read more...]

“My interpretation of [Leland Wilkinson’s] grammar [of statistical graphics]: —Data is the most important thing, and the thing that you bring to the table. —Geometric objects … what you actually see on the plot: points, lines, polygons, etc. ... [Read more...]

“My interpretation of [Leland Wilkinson’s] grammar [of statistical graphics]: —Data is the most important thing, and the thing that you bring to the table. —Geometric objects … what you actually see on the plot: points, lines, polygons, etc. ... [Read more...]

There are only three known jokes about statistics in the whole universe, so to complete the trilogy (see here and here for the other two), listen up: Three statisticians are on a train journey to a conference, and they get chatting to three epidemiologists who are also going to the ... [Read more...]