The relatively (to this decade) cool 2008 global temperatures spurred talks of a warming pause, or even global cooling. The claim usually comes from people who cherry picked either data sets and(!)/or start and end points of the global temperature trends to back up their allegation. The blogosphere already has a lot on this: Skeptical 
Adam Bonica, a grad student in political science at NYU, recently published a ranking of the political slant of various professions, based on the amount and recipient (Republican or Democratic) of political donations by lawyers, lobbyists, physicians and many other occupations. This paper (PDF) gives the complete analysis, but the chart below (created using the ggplot2 graphics package in...
Bespoke blogged about average monthly returns of the DJI and emphasized April. Before jumping on that information, let’s check some weak points. In that post, only average returns are presented. We need at least extreme points (min;max) and confidence ranges. Second problem – the normal market have upward trend and we need to get rid of
A dot plot is a type of display that compares counts, frequencies, totals or other summary measures for a series of categories. The dot plot can be arranged with the categories either on the vertical or horizontal axis of the display to allow comparising between the different categories as well as comparison within categories where
For those of you used to reading about international relations, I apologize for the following brief foray into American politics. It appears that the American Enterprise Institute and David Frum have decided to (abruptly) part ways. Before David left, however, he and his team of interns provided some interesting statistical insight into the
Hadley Wickham, creator of ggplot2, has posted a 2 hour video on data visualization using R. You can find links to the videos and slides over at Revolutions Blog. Check back here soon. I am working with Hadley to arrange a day-long ggplot2 short cours...
Hadley Wickham (the creator of the popular ggplot2 graphics package for R) has posted video of a 2-hour short course on Visualisation in R at his blip.tv channel. The video is split into four thirty-minute segments: Basic Graphics Displaying Large Data Data manipulation and transformations Polishing your plots for publication The course is peppered with self-guided exercises, for which...
“How to change the order of legend labels” is a question that gets asked relatively often on ggplot2 mailing list. A variation of this question is how to change the order of series in stacked bar/lineplots. While these two questions seem to be related, in fact they are separate as the legend is controlled by 
Here are some (trivial) R tips in the course Stat 511. I’ll update this post till the semester is over. Formatting R Code Reading code is pain, but the well-formatted code might alleviate the pain a little bit. The function tidy.source() in the animation package can help us format our R code automatically. By default
My parents and I made plans to visit San Jose and Saratoga on my grandmother’s birthday, March 19, since that is where she grew up. I randomly saw someone tweet about the ACM Data Mining Camp unconference that happened to be the next day, March 20, only a couple of miles from our hotel in Santa Clara. This was...
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
