(Hadley Wickham, author of ggplot2 and several other R packages, guest blogs today about forthcoming big-data improvements to his R graphics package -- ed.) Hi! I'm Hadley Wickham and I'm guest posting on the Revolutions blog to give you a taste of some of the visualisation work that my research ... [Read more...]

When working in research projects I tend to fit several, sometimes quite a few, alternative models. This model fitting is informed by theoretical considerations (e.g. quantitative genetics, experimental design we used, our understanding of the process under study, etc.) but … Continue reading → [Read more...]

This is simple example code to display side-by-side lattice plots or ggplot2 plots, using the mtcars dataset that comes with any R installation. We will display a scatterplot of miles per US gallon (mpg) on car weight (wt) next to … Continue reading → [Read more...]

In a previous post I explained how to create all possible combinations of the levels of two factors using expand.grid(). Another use for this function is to create a regular grid for two variables to create a levelplot or a … Continue reading → [Read more...]

The R Graph Gallery, the website from Romain François that showcases hundreds of examples of data visualization with R, has new social features. Now, when you find a graph or chart you find appealing or useful, you can "Like" it on Facebook or "+1" it on Google+. This should be ... [Read more...]

At the FlowingData blog, data visualization commentator and Visualize This author Nathan Yau lists 5 misconceptions about visualization: Software does everything (Nathan notes "Personally, I use a lot of R and have a lot of fun in Illustrator", but uses a lot of other tools as well.) Visualization is for making ... [Read more...]

Antoniak's 1974 article titled Mixtures of Dirichlet Processes with Applications to Bayesian Nonparametric Problems (Annals of Statistics 2(6):1152-1174) is a fundamental work for most modern developments in this area. The article gives two expressions for the expected number of distinct values in a sample of size n, drawn from a Dirichlet ... [Read more...]

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The bitly blog has posted a really interesting analysis of the effectiveness of links shared via the social-media services Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Here, effectiveness is measured by the "half-life" of a link: the amount of time it takes for that link to generate half the clicks it will ever ... [Read more...]

One of the coolest R packages I heard about at the useR! Conference: Toby Dylan Hocking‘s directlabels package for putting labels directly next to the relevant curves or point clouds in a figure. I think I first learned about this idea from Andrew Gelman: that a separate legend requires ... [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...]

I was at the useR! Conference at The University of Warwick in Coventry, UK, last week. My goal in going was to learn the latest things regarding (simple) dynamic graphics, (simple) web-based apps, parallel computing, and memory management (dealing with big data sets). I got just what I was hoping ... [Read more...]

Typically, I’m very bad at taking notes in conference. This time around, I intend to make notes for each some of the talks I attend at this year’s useR! 2011 conference. Below are my notes that I made during this afternoon’s tutorial. Note: these are just notes I ... [Read more...]

An article in FastCompany today profiles two websites that excel in telling engaging stories with data: the FlowingData and OkTrends blogs. Both sites often use R for data analysis and data visualization, and have been featured here on this blog. FlowingData regularly posts guides on how to use R to ... [Read more...]

This past Friday, the web portal to the US Federal government, USA.gov, organized hackathons across the US for programmers and data scientists to work with and analyze the data from their link-shortening service. It turns out that if you shorten a web link with bit.ly, the shortened link ... [Read more...]

Kickstarter, a social funding platform where individuals can chip in cash to get a worthy project going, just celebrated their 10,000th kickstarted project. Kickstart employee Fred Benenson recognized the achievement by visualizing the funding of music, design, art, game and many other kinds of projects using R and ggplot2. For ... [Read more...]

We've noted before that with the RGoogleVis package, it's easy to make motion charts in R, and create a web-based interactive chart that reflects the synchronous movements of two or three variables over time. R user Jeffrey Breen has a great new blog post showing exactly how easy it is, ... [Read more...]

Thanks to everyone at who attended last night's Bay Area R User Group meeting, and a special thanks to our hosts Socialize (a company that makes a mobile SDK for application developers that increases user engagement) who were very generous in letting the group use their San Francisco digs for ... [Read more...]

If you want the graphics you create with R to look their best, in general it's best to go for a vector-based graphics format instead of a raster-based format. Common formats like GIF and JPG are raster-based: the image is composed of pixels, and if you don't choose a high ... [Read more...]