A. Background We usually want to write reusable code that is compact and could be utilized in a number of use cases. That involves writing user defined functions that can take particular input values, perform some set of steps, and returns an output. I... [Read more...]

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Anyone who is writing R code should get familiar with logging. While it may not be useful for writing exploratory scripts or doing basic coding projects, logging can be critical when doing development work as it helps track what your code is doing. In this post, I will provide some ... [Read more...]

Both R and Python have facilities where the coder can write a script which requests a user to input some information. In Python 2.6, the main function for this task is raw_input (in Python 3.0, it’s input()). In R, there are a series of functions that can be used to ... [Read more...]

I recently began using the TwitteR package in R to examine my tweeting patterns. One of my first projects was to identify each of my Twitter followers, where they were located, how many tweets they had, and then plot their location on a map using a bubble which was related ... [Read more...]

I’ve recently been scouring the internet for a public opinion data set pertaining to job satisfaction. I was particularly interested in examining how gender, age, and socio-economic status influence how satisfied an individual is with their current employment situation. For example, existing research suggests that women and private-sector employees ... [Read more...]

A/B testing is a method for comparing the effectiveness of several different variations of a web page. For example, an online clothing retailer that specializes in mens’ streetwear may want to examine whether a black or pink background results in more purchases from visitors to the site. Lets say ... [Read more...]

The subset function is available in base R and can be used to return subsets of a vector, martix, or data frame which meet a particular condition. In my three years of using R, I have repeatedly used the subset() function and believe that it is the most useful tool ... [Read more...]

In a previous post, I discussed how to generate PPC keywords in R. In this post I will provide another example of how to perform this task. Let’s say that I am a auto insurance company that only operates in the state of Illinois. I’m planing on bidding ... [Read more...]

Paid search marketing refers to the process of driving traffic to a website by purchasing ads on search engines. Advertisers bid on certain keywords that users might search for, and that determines when and where their ads appear. For example, an individual who owns an auto dealership would want to ... [Read more...]

  This is the first in a series of blog posts in which I use the R package GGPlot2 to examine real world data. In this post, I construct a line graph of U.S. shoe consumption from 1995 to 2007. A recent survey conducted by Shop Smart magazine found that the average ... [Read more...]

  The sqldf package can be used to run sql queries on R data frames. The user simply needs to specify a sql statement enclosed by quotation marks within the sqldf() function. In the follow R code, you see various ways of using the sqldf package to run sql queries on ... [Read more...]

In recent months, there has been a series of high profile incidents in the United States where police officers were killed. While such events are unfortunate, the data suggests that it is extremely rare for an officer to be harmed or killed while on duty. In this post, I examine ... [Read more...]