In this post I use OpenStreetsMaps and ggplot2 to plot geographically were psychologists live, using data from a facebook document. [Read more...]

I searched PubMed for several major DSM-IV disorders and downloaded the hits. Using ggplot2 I plotted the number of publications each year for each disorder. [Read more...]

must admit that I have been tired of maintaining my R packages for a long time, and the main reason is I feel really uncomfortable with writing R documentations (Rd). The required structure of an R package mainly includes two directories R and man — the former for the R source ... [Read more...]

regor Gorjanc published an interesting article “Using Sweave with LyX” in R News in 2008, which (I believe) makes it much easier to use Sweave. I use command-line tools a lot every day, but I am still “GUI-addicted”. (I don’t want to comment more about Microsoft Word here.) LyX is ... [Read more...]

ables are pretty common in web pages as data sources, and the most direct way to get these data is probably to copy and paste. This is OK if there are only two or three tables, and when we need to grab 5000 tables in 1000 web pages, we may not really ... [Read more...]

his blog post is mainly for Stat 579 students on the homework for week 7, since I received too many “gory” loops in the homework submissions and I think it would help a bit to write my thoughts on R loops for beginners. The immortal motto for newbies in programming is: If ... [Read more...]

It is not uncommon to see messy R code which is almost not human-readable like this: # rotation of the word "Animation" # in a loop; change the angle and color # step by step for (i in 1:360) { # redraw the plot again and again plot(1,ann=FALSE,type="n",axes=FALSE) # rotate; use ... [Read more...]

mber Watkins gave me a suggestion on the animation for the ratio estimation, and I think this is a good topic for my animation package. I’ve finished writing the initial version of the function sample.ratio() for this package, which will appear in the version 1.1-2 a couple of ... [Read more...]

oday Romain Francois posted an interesting topic in the R-help list, and you can read his blog post for more details: celebrating R commit #50000. 50000 is certainly not a small number; we do owe R core members a big “thank you” for their great efforts in this fantastic statistical language in ... [Read more...]

s Sir Francis Bacon said, “Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics subtile; natural philosophy deep; moral grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend.” And Windows stupid. He should have added the last sentence if he were a Windows user in this age. 1. Avoid Using M$ Excel A lot ... [Read more...]

ag cloud is a bunch of words drawn in a graph with their sizes proportional to their frequency; it’s widely used in blogs to visualize tags. We can observe important words quickly from a tag cloud, as they often appear in large fontsize. Tony N. Brown asked how to “... [Read more...]