Building a Simple Web App using R

I’ve been interested in building a web app using R for a while, but never put any time into it until I was informed of the Shiny package.  It looked too easy, so I absolutely had to try it out.

First you need to install the package from the command line .

options(repos=c(RStudio="http://rstudio.org/_packages", getOption("repos"))) install.packages("shiny")

The version in the tutorial uses a two R files, won the front end(ui.R) and the other being the server side (server.R).  However, I wanted a refresher in HTML, so I built it with one HTML and one R file.  The structure is defined here.

For the data, I’m using MLS (home sales) data for Philadelphia, which I’ve been sitting on for quite a while.  The thought behind the app is to be able to examine monthly average listing prices to monthly average prices, and in the end it turned out rather well.

At first, I had the server.R try to do everything within the reactive function, but it  literally took minutes to load a new graph. The solution was to run the data through the following and just have the reactive function call from the data frames:

##raw data d ##convert to numeric from factored variable zip<-as.numeric(as.character(d$area)) #round the listing date to first of the month listed<-paste(format(as.POSIXlt(d$listdate), format="%Y-%m"), "01", sep="-") #round the sales date to first of the month solded<-paste(format(as.POSIXlt(d$solddate), format="%Y-%m"), "01", sep="-") #create the time period period<-seq(as.Date("2010-02-01"), length=24, by="1 month") #create empty data frame for average monthly listing and sales data listing<-data.frame(period=period) sales<-data.frame(period=period) ##list of all zip codes in Philly that we'll examine a<-list("19103","19111","19114","19115","19116","19119","19120", "19124","19125","19128","19130","19131","19134","19135","19136", "19138","19142","19143","19144","19145","19146","19147","19148", "19149","19152","19154") #find the average monthly listing and sales figures for each zip code for(z in a){ listing[[z]]<- sapply(period, function(x) mean(d[x >= listed & x <= solded & zip==z, 'listprice'])) sales[[z]]<-sapply(period, function(x) mean((d[ x== solded & zip==z, 'soldprice']))) } ##save both files because the server will have to call it save(sold, listing, file="shiny.RData")

Once the data is saved, the structure of the UI and Server can be defined.  The UI in HTML was very easy (found here),  All did was change , add background pic to the body , add more zip code choices to the drop down box (<select>), and make sure that the plot was properly defined in <div>

The server side was a little more complicated, but once all the data was defined outside of the reactive function it went very smoothly.  First, call any packages you need, load the data, and, finally, call the shinyServer function.

## load all neccesary packages library(shiny) library("zoo") library("reshape2") library("ggplot2") library("plyr") library("gridExtra") ## load data load("~/Documents/shiny.RData")

# Define server logic required to plot various zips shinyServer(function(input, output) { # Generate a plot of the requested zip code for sale and listing averages output$plot average<-data.frame(period, sold=sold[[input$zip]], listing=listing[[input$zip]]) dfm <- melt(average, id = "period", measure = c("sold","listing")) c<-qplot(period, value, data=dfm, geom="smooth", colour = variable,xlim = as.Date(c("2010-02-01","2012-01-01")),xlab="Date",ylab="Average Price")+ scale_colour_manual(values=c("#0000CC","#000000")) print(c) }) })

The first line of the shinyServer sets up the data, with the columns defined as the months during the defined two years, the average monthly sales data for selected zip, and the average monthly listing data for each zip. The next line is melting the data, which is used in the next line for plotting. For the plot, I chose qplot and a  smoothed line because the sales data was so stochastic.

I didn’t deploy this to the interweb, but the final product looks like this:

QED

For a cleaner version of the final code, go to my git hub here.