Over the past month there have been a number of package updates in the deducer ecosystem. Deducer is a general purpose, extensible, data analysis GUI. It is designed to be a free easy to use alternative to proprietary data analysis software such as SPSS, JMP, and Minitab. It has a ... [Read more...]

A new package OpenStreetMap has been released to CRAN this week which is designed to allow you to easily add satellite imagery, or open street maps to your plots. Raster maps are a great way to add context to your spatial data with a minimum outlay of effort. The syntax ... [Read more...]

The word cloud is a commonly used plot to visualize a speech or set of documents in a succinct way. I really like them. They can be extremely visually pleasing, and you can spend a lot of time perusing over the words gaining new insights. That said, they don't convey ... [Read more...]

I am excited to announce the addition of DeducerSpatial to the Deducer plug-in ecosystem. DeducerSpatial is a graphical user interface for the visualization and analysis of spatial data, built on Deducer's plug-in platform. In a previous post I illustrated how to user DeducerSpatial from the command line to add Open ... [Read more...]

Despite the fact that Excel is the most widespread application for data manipulation and (perhaps) analysis, R's support for the xls and xlsx file formats has left a lot to be desired. Fortunately, the XLConnect package has been created to fill this void, and now JGR 1.7-8 includes integration with ... [Read more...]

Last week a question came up on Stack Overflow about determining whether a variable is distributed normally. Some of the answers reminded me of a common and pervasive misconception about how to apply tests against normality. I felt the topic was general enough to reproduce my comments here (with minor ... [Read more...]

So, installing rgdal, which is an important R package for spatial data analysis can be a bit of a pain on the mac. Here are two ways to make it happen.   The Easy Way In R run: install.packages('rgdal',repos="http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/RWin") The ... [Read more...]

There have been some exciting developments in the Deducer ecosystem over the summer which should go into CRAN release in the next few months. Today I'm going to give a quick sneak peek at an Open Street Map - R connection with accompanying GUI. This post will just show the ... [Read more...]