Having got my NHS Winter sitrep data scraper into shape (I think!), and dabbled with a quick Shiny demo using the R/Shiny library, I thought I’d tidy it up a little over the weekend and long the way learn a few new presentation tricks. To quickly recap the data availability, the NHS publish a weekly 
Last week we posted a nice theory about daylight savings time, in particular, that its dates were chosen to reduce variance in the time of sunrise. It looked plausible from the graph. We were talking to our Microsoft Research colleague Jake Hofman who suggested "why don't you just find the optimal dates to change the clock by one hour?" So...
Here’s a code snippet I thought I’d share. Very often I find myself checking the output of a function f(a,b) for a lot of different values of a and b, which I then need to plot somehow. An example: here’s a function that computes the value of a sinusoidal function on a grid of points, 
One of the most popular posts on this blog is the very first one, solving the issue of mapping certain ranges of values to particular colors in heatmaps. Given the abundance of ggplot2 usage in R plotting, I thought I’d … Continue reading →
I have been playing with the beta version of qdap utilizing the presidential debates as a data set. qdap is in a beta phase lacking documentation though I’m getting there. In previous blog posts (presidential debate 1 LINK and VP … Continue reading →
This is a quick follow-up to my previous post about Color Palettes in RGB Space. Achim Zeileis had commented that, perhaps, it would be more informative to evaluate the color palettes in HCL (polar LUV) space, as that spectrum more accurately describes how humans perceive color. Perhaps more clear trends would emerge in HCL space,
One Paragraph Summary Always explore your data visually. Whatever specific hypothesis you have when you go out to collect data is likely to be worse than any of the hypotheses you’ll form after looking at just a few simple visualizations of that data. The most effective hypothesis testing framework in existence is the test of
Since F-Secure was #spiffy enough to provide us with GeoIP data for mapping the scope of the ZeroAccess botnet, I thought that some aspiring infosec data scientists might want to see how to use something besides Google Maps & Google Earth to view the data. If you look at the CSV file, it’s formatted as
ggplot2 has just hit 0.9.2, and with the change comes a new theme system. Previous versions of ggplot2 offered a theme_blank(), which was a stripped-down, essentially blank plotting canvas, but it is now deprecated. github user jrnold has produced a s...
In our previous post, we used a quick-and-dirty method for ordering the axes on our heatmap. It has been pointed out to me that There is a Package for That (which is my nominee for a new slogan for R — not that it needs a slogan). seriation offe...
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
