After a bit of a summer lull, the Montreal R User Group is meeting up again! We’re trying out a new venue this time. Notman House is the home of the web in Montreal. They hold hackathons and other tech user group meetups, and they are all around great ... [Read more...]

Some people like to do crossword puzzles. I like to do machine learning puzzles. Lucky for me, a new contest was just posted yesterday on Kaggle. So naturally, my lazy Saturday was spent getting elbow deep into the data. The training set consists of a series of ‘skies’, each containing ... [Read more...]

A question that often comes across various help lists is how to combine or split an output from an R graphics device. Maybe you have looped/combined multiple visuals into a single pdf to avoid cluttering your working directory and now … Continue reading → [Read more...]

At last weekend’s Hack Ta Ville event here in Montreal, I joined up with some talented urban planners and web devs to realize Vélobstacles. The idea of the project is to crowd source information on cycling conditions around the city. As with any crowd sourcing project, we were ... [Read more...]

As an invasion biologist, the process of spatial spread is at the heart of what I do. When I came across this dataset of Walmart store openings since 1962 I couldn’t help but see it as an invasion front which looks a lot like a biological invasion or (albeit slow) ... [Read more...]

Economic geography of the eastern USA circa 1999, median incomes by zip code Code and data source to follow in a longer post. [Read more...]

If you haven’t yet discovered the competitive machine learning site kaggle.com, please do so now. I’ll wait. Great – so, you checked it out, fell in love and have made it back. I recently downloaded the data for the getting started competition. It consists of 42000 labelled images (28×28) of ... [Read more...]

multiplicitiesoffreedom demonstrates Chaos Theory in Excel. If he filled in more initial values, you would see a thick bar—like a picture of white-noise. Butterflies flapping their wings in Vermont to change the wind in Hangzhou? A drop of water on ... [Read more...]

First of all, useR 2012 (the 8th International R User Conference) was, hands down, the best-organized conference I’ve had the luck to attend. The session chairs kept everything moving on time, tactfully but sternly; the catering was delicious and varied; … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Just a quick note that I’ve posted the slides, code, and dataset from my useR 2012 talk. I’m having a great time here in Nashville and will write up a conference review soon, with links to the many excellent packages … Continue reading → [Read more...]

  While Tsipras and his Syriza coalition have been busy in Greek parliament, the Internet has been a-buzz with speculation that their platform will result in a Greek exit from the Euro currency.  This prospect, affectionately dubbed “Grexit” by Citi… Read more › [Read more...]

  The NATO summit is currently being held in Chicago, and, as is typical for NATO or G# summits, the streets and tweets are full of dissent.  In the spirit of my past investigations of online dissent (#jan25, #25bahman, #12fev,… Read more › [Read more...]

Let’s say you’ve used my Python script to automate the download of a hashtag or search phrase from Twitter (in a Unicode safe way, unlike within R).  Now let’s say you want to visualize the number of tweets over time.  Easy… Read more › [Read more...]

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Bias in Federal Reserve Inflation Forecasts: Christopher Gandrud uses ggplot2 to visualize potential partisan bias in US Federal Reserve inflation forecasts as a PhD student at the London School of Economics. [Read more...]

The recent Hack/Reduce hackathon in Montreal was a tonne of fun. Our team tackled a data set of consisting of Bixi (Montreal’s bicycle share system) station states at one minute temporal resolution. We used Hadoop and mapreduce to pull out some features of user behaviours. One of the ... [Read more...]

  Here’s a fun example of how you might use my data on Congressional bill length and complexity.  Imagine you want to understand the empirical distribution of Flesch-Kincaid reading level for Congressional bills and how this distribution is related to … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Visualization is a key to success in regression analysis. This is one of the (many) reasons I am also suspicious when I read an article with a quantitative (econometric) analysis without any graph. Consider for instance the following dataset, obtai... [Read more...]

I wrote a quick (and very dirty) R script for creating a comparison cloud and a commonality cloud for President Obama’s 2011 and 2012 State of the Union speeches*. The cloud on the left shows words that have different frequencies between the two spe... [Read more...]

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