Tim Hortons Density Inspired by this post, I wanted to examine the locations and density of Tim Hortons restaurants in Canada. Using Stats Canada data, each census tract is queried on Foursquare for Tims locations. Setup options(stringsAsFactors = F) require(timmysDensity) require(plyr) require(maps) require(ggplot2) require(geosphere) Statistics Canada Census Data The actual Statistics Canada data at the dissemination block level can be downloaded from here. You will want to...
Following a now well-established pattern, let me (re)warn (the few) unwary ‘Og readers that the links to Amazon.com and to Amazon.fr found on this blog are actually susceptible to...
Fukushima is still a topic which gets headlines, and somewhere in a comment was a link to actual and historical radiation data: Fukushima prefecture radioactivity measurement map. It...
R Interface for Teaching Kaitlin Thaney asked on Twitter last week about using Ramnath Vaidyanathan's new interactive R notebook 1 2 for teaching. Liking the look of...
I spent yesterday at the very enjoyable Big Data Summit held at the University of Illinois Research Park at the edge of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. campus. My (short) presentation was...
Carrying on from the last post, I'm going to take a closer look at election results for the 2012 US presidential election in North Carolina. This state's 15 electoral...
The problem with puzzles is that you keep it in your head for days, until you find an answer. Or at least some ideas about a possible answer. This...
You’ve probably heard about the t distribution. One good use for this distribution is as an alternative to the normal distribution that is more robust against outliers. But where...
Dear diary, I spent a lot of my summer in the lab, and my fall has been mostly data analysis, with a little writing and a couple of courses...
Using Samatha So I decided to try out David Springates Samatha package for statically building this blog. If you decide to use it, be warned, right now it is a...
Mebane Faber posted another interesting blog post: Building a Simple Sector Rotation on Momentum and Trend that caught my interest. Today I want to show how you can test...
Recently, I was looking at some published research, and I became concerned that it looked strange. Firstly, it had results wildly different to other similar studies, and more exciting...
A Le Monde mathematical puzzle of moderate difficulty: How many binary quintuplets (a,b,c,d,e) can be found such that any pair of quintuplets differs by at least two digits? I...
I've finally had some success at munging some HTML. For quite some time, I've wanted to render a county level choropleth for US presidential election results. The numbers are...
For many of the people I talk to, Julia’s main appeal is speed. But achieving peak performance in Julia requires that programmers absorb a few subtle concepts that are...
A recent article by Matt Asay claims that "Python is displacing R as the language for data science". Python has certainly made some great strides in recent years, evolving...
As I go about cleaning and merging data sets with R I often end up creating and using simple functions over and over. When this happens, I stick them...
I would like to recommend a recent workshop material on R/Bioconductor from Marc Carlson et al.http://www.bioconductor.org/help/course-materials/2013/SeattleMay2013/PDF: IntermediateSequenceAnalysis2013.pdfR script: IntermediateSequenceAnalysis201...
This week we released a new package on CRAN: jsonlite. This package is a fork of RJSONIO by Duncan Temple Lang...
It is a well known problem that in some models as the number of observations becomes large, econometric estimators fail to converge on consistent estimators. The leading case of...
Some time back, I started a project on GitHub wherein I would explore the efficacy of financial literacy efforts in the area where I live. This is done with...
With Stéphane Tufféry we’ve been working on credit scoring1 and we’ve been using the popular german credit dataset, > myVariableNames <- c("checking_status","duration","credit_history", + "purpose","credit_amount","savings","employment","installment_rate", + "personal_status","other_parties","residence_since","property_magnitude", + "age","other_payment_plans","housing","existing_credits","job", +...
If you use attach, it is easy to tell if a variable exists. You can simply use exists to check:>attach(df)>exists("varName") TRUEHowever, if you don't use attach (and I find you generally...
I had the pleasure of visiting technology guru Robert Scoble at Rackspace Labs a few weeks ago. We had a great conversation about the Big Data revolution, and how...
Below is an updated version of the image.scale function. In the old version, one had to constantly use additional arguments to suppress axes and their labels. The new version...
Dear R-enthusiastic, I discovered Plotly some days ago, and I was fascinated by it. What is Plotly? Plotly is a service for creating and sharing data visualizations that also...
I have been meaning to write a long post explaining each of the major R projects I am currently working on, but I can't seem to find the time...
So my first attempt to sort out the career of Michael Caine via parsing of HTML data was a wash. I'm going to try this again, using Wikipedia. They've...
It is common for researchers to be concerned about unobserved effects being correlated with observed explanatory variables.For instance, if we were curious about the effect of meditation on emotional...
