In this post I will explore public data being collected by Slate.  I previously released code using a much early set of this data demonstrating how to turn this data into an animated map.This data began collection as a public response to the horri... [Read more...]

If you can walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing (Zimbabwe Proverb) There are two things in this picture I would like to emphasise. First one is that everything is made using points and lines. The moon is an enormous point, stars are three small nested ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert I am a book person. I collect books on all sorts of subjects that interest me and consequently I have a fairly extensive collection of R books, many of which I find to be of great value. Nevertheless, when I am asked to recommend an R book ... [Read more...]

What is the best way to read data in JSON format into R? Though really common for almost all modern online applications, JSON is not every R user's best friend. After seeing the slides for my Web Scraping course, in which I somewhat arbitrarily veered between using the packages rjson ... [Read more...]

Several people have asked: what scripting language should biologists learn if they are interested in doing a little larger-scale data analysis and have never programmed before? I’m not an expert, but these are the kinds of things I tend to say: The language is not so important; the same ... [Read more...]

We recently pushed the first version of rnoaa to CRAN - version 0.1. NOAA has a lot of data, some of which is provided via the National Climatic Data Center, or NCDC. NOAA has provided access to NCDC climate data via a RESTful API - which is great because people like ... [Read more...]

I had the opportunity recently to be asked to join a committee which had to select candidates for an upcoming election. In the candidate selection phase, the members of the committee use preferential voting to rank the candidates. Prior to the meeting, I did some research on preferential voting systems. ... [Read more...]

Last year in my post d3 [Read more...]

The worldwide R user conference, useR! 2014, will take in Los Angeles, June 30-July 3. If you're an R user, or just interested in learning about what R can do first-hand from members of the R community, this is the conference to attend. To get an idea of what to expect, check ... [Read more...]

Today’s email brought this one: I was wondering if I could get your opinion on a particular problem that I have run into during the reviewing process of an article. Basically, I have an analysis where I am looking at a couple of time-series and I wanted to know ... [Read more...]

To those going to ENAR this year: Are you trying to find who’s presenting at ENAR from your department but all that pdf searching got you down?  Are you trying to make an itinerary but dislike copying and pasting from a pdf?  Well I have a Shiny App for ... [Read more...]

My LondonR Talk Thanks to Mango Solutions (LondonR organiser), I was given the opportunity last night to talk about my mini project ‘CrimeMap’. Instead of going through all the technical details behind the scenes, I chose to talk the audience through my R journey from a noob to a heavy ... [Read more...]

Software Carpentry is an international collaboration backed by Mozilla and the Sloan Foundation comprising a team of volunteers that teach computational competence and basic programming skills to scientists. In addition to a suite of online lessons, ... [Read more...]

I had a nice workshop two weeks ago in Tübingen (south-germany) concerning Generalized Linear Mixed Models (GLMM) in R. The course was given by two ecologist: Dr. Pius and Fränzi Korner-Nievergelt  that spend now half of their time doing statistical consulting (http://www.oikostat.ch/navigation_engl.htm). ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from February of particular interest to R users: A statistical analysis of various forecasting methods (using R) leads to correct predictions for 21 of 24 Oscars awards. There are now 123 R User Groups worldwide, and applications for Revolution Analytics sponsorship grants are open ... [Read more...]

An email I received today: I have a small problem. I have a time series called x : - If I use the default values of auto.arima(x), the best model is an ARIMA(1,0,0) - However, I tried the function ndiffs(x, test=“adf”) and ndiffs(x, test=“kpss”) as ... [Read more...]

My previous article shows an example in which data analysis requires a structured framework with R and OOP. In order to explain how to build the framework this article describes how to do that in more detail. Using OOP means … Continue reading → [Read more...]

APIs present researchers with a diverse set of data sources through a standardised access mechanism: send a pasted together HTTP request, receive JSON or XML in return. Today we tap into a range of APIs to get comfortable sending queries and processing... [Read more...]

Introduction It is not uncommon to want to digitize values from a graph in a paper, whether to do some initial analysis without bothering an author, or to get data from a paper published so long ago that the data are available only graphically. Although there are several software applications ... [Read more...]

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