Following on from the sketched ideas relating to estimating the Potential Audience Size for a Hashtag Community?, here are a few quick doodles around the graph representation of the tag users – followers graph that explore the extent to which we can use quite simple counts and analyses to get a ... [Read more...]

In a previous post, I demonstrated how to use my R package MHadapive to do general MCMC to estimate Bayesian models. The functions in this package are an implementation of  the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm. In this post, I want to provide an intuitive way to picture what is going on ‘under ... [Read more...]

What’s the potential audience size around a Twitter hashtag? Way back when, in the early days of webs stats, reported figures tended to centre around the notion of hits, the number of calls made to a server via website activity. I forget the details, but the metric was presumably ... [Read more...]

Some of us over at McGill’s Biology Graduate Student Association have been developing and delivering R/Statistics workshops over the last few years. Through invited graduate students and faculty, we have tackled  everything from multi-part introductory workshops to get your feet wet, to special topics such as GLMs, GAMs, ... [Read more...]

If you can write the likelihood function for your model, MHadaptive will take care of the rest (ie. all that MCMC business). I wrote this R package to simplify the estimation of posterior distributions of arbitrary models. Here’s how it works: 1) Define your model (ie the likelihood * prior). In ... [Read more...]

I think one of valid criticisms around a lot of the visualisations I post here and on my various #f1datajunkie blogs is that I often don’t post any explanatory context around the visualisations. This is partly a result of the way I use my blog posts in a ... [Read more...]

(Almost) every introductory course in probability introduces conditional probability using the famous Monte Hall problem. In a nutshell, the problem is one of deciding on a best strategy in a simple game. In the game, the contestant is asked to select one of three doors. Behind one of the doors ... [Read more...]

For fear of being left way behind as Martin Hawksey starts to get to grips with R, (see for example how he’s using R to automate the annotation of Google Spreadsheets with calculations that don’t come readily or efficiently to hand in Google Spreadsheets itself), I thought I ... [Read more...]

I grabbed independent samples of 1500 recent users of the #newsnight and #bbcqt hashtags within a minute or two of each other about half an hour ago. Here’s who’s followed by 25 or more of the recent hashtaggers in each case. Can you distinguish the programmes each audience interest projection ... [Read more...]

Following on from A Tool Chain for Plotting Twitter Archive Retweet Graphs – Py, R, Gephi, here’s a quick view summary view over #UKGC12 tweets saved in Google Spreadsheet archive as developed by Martin Hawksey, generated from an R script (R code available here; #ukgc12 tweet archive here)… (I did ... [Read more...]

One of the great things about (software) code is that people build on it and out from it… Which means that as well as producing ever more complex bits of software, tools also get produced over time that make it easier to do things that were once hard to do, ... [Read more...]

Tomorrow, we will discuss Fisher-Tippett theorem. The idea is that there are only three possible limiting distributions for normalized versions of the maxima of i.i.d. samples . For bounded distribution, consider e.g. the uniform distribution on t... [Read more...]

So if you’re in need of deploying that nifty Rook app you made, download the latest release 0.1-3 on my github account or wait for it to appear on CRAN. That is all. [Read more...]

I’m feeling chancy, just like those two angels who took a chance on me so many years ago… So I decided to release rApache 1.1.15. You can grab the source from rapache.net. Notable change includes support for deploying Rook applications, which you [Read more...]

I love board games. Over the holidays, I came across this interesting post over at Arthur Charpentier’s Freakonometrics blog about the classic game of snakes and ladders. The post is a nice little demonstration of how the game can be formulated completely as a Markov chain, and can be ... [Read more...]

Things have been a little quiet, post wise here, of late, in part because of the holiday season… but I have been posting notes on a couple of charts in progress over on the F1DataJunkie blog. Here are links to the posts in chronological order – they capture the evolution ... [Read more...]

Another set of stepping stones that provide a clunky route to a solution that @mhawksey has been working on a far more elegant expression of (eg Free the tweets! Export TwapperKeeper archives using Google Spreadsheet and Twitter: How to archive event hashtags and create an interactive visualization of the conversation)… ... [Read more...]

With R, it is extremely easy to draw maps. Let us start with something simple, like French regions. Baptiste mentioned on his blog that shapefiles can be downloaded from http://ign.fr/ website. Hence, if you extract the zip file, it is possible to ... [Read more...]

In Rescuing Twapperkeeper Archives Before They Vanish, I described a routine for grabbing Twapperkeeper archives, parsing them, and saving them to a local desktop file using the R programming language (downloading RStudio is the easiest way I know of getting R…). Following a post fron @briankelly (Responding to the Forthcoming ... [Read more...]

A couple of years or so ago, various JISC folk picked up on the idea that there might be value in them thar tweets and started encouraging the use of Twapperkeeper for archiving hashtagged tweets around events, supporting the development of that service in exchange for an open source version ... [Read more...]