We’ve previously covered the convex hull here at is.R(), and in that post I admitted that I was somewhat hard-pressed to come up with a common use-case — at least for Political Science applications. Well, today’s Gist illustrates the... [Read more...]

Oftentimes you might be writing in LaTeX and trying to push your results from R into your .tex file. This, at times, can be very frustrating. Luckily, there’s apsrtable, an R package that automatically produces the LaTeX code for your  R model ... [Read more...]

Oftentimes we find ourselves collaborating with others who might not use R or prefer to use Stata to clean and manage their data. Luckily, there is the foreign package that permits handling data of different types (SAS, SPSS, Stata, etc.) within the R... [Read more...]

We’ve used NOMINATE scaling data before here at is.R(), but today’s Gist shows, in just a few lines of code, how to download up-to-date roll call data and run those votes through Keith Poole (et. al.)’s DW-NOMINATE procedure. It&#82... [Read more...]

The zoo package is designed for use with (potentially irregular) time series data. It is widely used for any number of applications, but among its most frequently useful functions are the roll* functions, such as rollmean, rollmedian, rollmax, rollapp... [Read more...]

We’re going to try, this December, to bring you an “Advent CalendaR,” for each of the 24 days leading up to Christmas. Each day, our hope is to unwrap a useful R package to show you a useful or interesting function inside! Today&#821... [Read more...]

Finally, to return to the challenge I laid out in the first of this series on image manipulation in R: can we do anything as cool in R as can be done in Mathematica? Like, for example, this illustration of how to search images of the surface of Mars... [Read more...]

This is probably the coolest-looking thing I’ve figured out how to do with raster images in R. Similar to (although not quite as impressive as) these images by Jeff Clark, I alter the simple k-means approach described in the previous post to... [Read more...]

The idea of deriving color palettes from images has long been an interest of mine. There are places you can do this online, but it’s at least plausible that you might want to identify dominant colors programatically, for a large number of image... [Read more...]

So, you know how to load PNG files, access their innards, and plot them as points in a scatter plot. But, is it possible to use R to do some of the awesome things you can do with Mathematica? Well, in this series of posts, I’ll introduce just ... [Read more...]

Today’s post is mostly to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving. We will be taking the rest of the week off, and will return on Monday. Below is some code to reproduce the adorable Turkey above; enjoy! https://gist.github.com/4122464 [Read more...]

I’ll be subbing today for Chris, as we continue to explore some ggplot2 basics. Today, imagine that you have data distributed in two dimensions, and that you would like to convey differences in point density over space. As with many things, this... [Read more...]

Now that the election is over, you may want to use polling data in a model of the campaign. Simon Jackman has thoughtfully made his daily state-by-state predictions available for download, but a commonly-used dataset is the RealClearPolitics polling a... [Read more...]

So, when you’re setting the position of text in ggplot, you may have to use the hjust and vjust commands. Depending on your demands, and if you don’t understand what they’re doing, they might seem hard to use. I found one script that... [Read more...]

Yesterday’s post showed a number of quick coding options for changing text in a basic ggplot. Here’s another two tricks for fine-tuning faceted plots. Again, let’s load our made up data about tooth growth (a real dataset in R, ToothGr... [Read more...]

While I know there are several awesome guides for how to make fine-tuning adjustments to plot labels/axes/ticks/text in ggplot, this is still the most common question I get from people new to ggplot: how do I change the size/font/color/position of (som... [Read more...]

This post continues with the theme of how to modify plots from within ggplot; today we will specifically looking at custom axis breaks. Plots later in the week will examine the commands to change text in the plot area. The various other shortcomings o... [Read more...]

I mostly wrote this just to see how locator() works, and ended up making an HCL color picker, so you can make your own visually offensive rainbow color palettes! Or, you can make your own nice color palettes. It is up to you. Essentially, this script... [Read more...]

The last few days have been trying, mostly because folks keep asking me the same questions: have you voted? Who do you think will win the election? Do you think Nate Silver (http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/)  is right? How confident are you ... [Read more...]

You’ve already seen everyone else’s electoral map (see this amazing array of maps from 2008), how would you like to make your own? Today’s Gist allows you to do just that — input (manually!) state-by-state results, and output a... [Read more...]