In my PhD and post-doc research projects at the university, I did a lot of research on the new cosmopolitanism together with Ulrich Beck. Our main goal was to test the hypothesis of an “empirical cosmopolitanization”. Maybe the term is confusing and too abstract, but what we were looking for ... [Read more...]

A common problem when trying to show data is that the attributes that you want to map for comparison are stored in multiple rather than single variables. For example, proportion of employment by type. This practical will achieve tis using … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Occasionally I find myself wanting to draw several regression lines on the same plot, and of course ggplot2 has convenient facilities for this. As usual, don’t expect anything profound from this post, just a quick tip! There are several reasons we might end up with a table of  regression ... [Read more...]

I am looking for a new car. So when I saw there was an update on vehicles in Statistics Netherlands I just had to go and look at the data. So, I learned the brown is getting more popular, often the number of cars from a certain construction year is ... [Read more...]

In my previous post (http://statcompute.wordpress.com/2013/05/25/test-drive-of-parallel-computing-with-r) on 05/25/2013, I’ve demonstrated the power of parallel computing with various R packages. However, in the real world, it is not straight-forward to utilize these powerful tools in our day-by-day computing tasks without carefully formulate the problem. In the example below, ... [Read more...]

Twitter has become an important communications tool for political protests. While mass media are often censored during large-scale political protests, Social Media channels remain relatively open and can be used to tell the world what is happening and to mobilize support all over the world. From an analytic perspective tweets ... [Read more...]

Historical Stock Data is critical for testing your investment strategies. I illustrated all my back-test examples with getSymbols function from quantmod package. For example, following is a back-test comparison for a few portfolio allocation methods: The getSymbols function, from quantmod package, downloads historical stock prices from Yahoo Fiance. I often ... [Read more...]

This is an attempt at learning and interactively displaying few results using twitter data using text mining. Interactivity is implemented using RStudio's shiny server. Their documentation of demo scripts came in very handy. As a non-user of twitter, I... [Read more...]

With geo-tagging enabled, tweets include information on the location of the user when the tweet was sent. Miguel Rios (@miguelrios) has plotted locations of billions of tweets to create maps of the world. This is pretty amazing stuff – a world map rendered just from twitter posts! Maps are created using ... [Read more...]

A list of interesting R/Stats quickies to keep the mind distracted: A long draft Advanced Data Analysis from an Elementary Point of View by Cosma Shalizi, in which he uses R to drive home the message. Not your average elementary point of view. Good notes by Frank Davenport on ... [Read more...]

What is PhyloPic? PhyloPic is an awesome new service - I'll let the creator, Mike Keesey, explain what it is (paraphrasing here): PhyloPic stores silhouette images of organisms, and each image is associated with taxonomic names, and stores the taxonomy of all taxa, allowing searching by taxonomic names. Anyone can ... [Read more...]