For a while now, I have been looking for ways to incorporate pretty D3 graphics into R markdown reports or shiny apps. Why? I like R for the ability to be able to do data handling, stats, ML all very easily with minimal code. But when you want to prese... [Read more...]

Help? I set an exam question with 10 boxes to be filled from 13 possible answers. If randomly completed, what should be the average mark? - @KeithRMatthews, 12:13 PM - 15 Dec 2016 library(ggplot2) answers [Read more...]

Part of our mission at The Data Lab is to create jobs in Data Science. This got us thinking that perhaps we should find a systematic way of quantifying the job market in Scotland and generally. We stumbled upon Adzuna, never heard of it? It’s quite c... [Read more...]

Part of our mission at The Data Lab is to create jobs in Data Science. This got us thinking that perhaps we should find a systematic way of quantifying the job market in Scotland and generally. We stumbled upon Adzuna, never heard of it? It’s quite cool, looks and ... [Read more...]

Part of our mission at The Data Lab is to create jobs in Data Science. This got us thinking that perhaps we should find a systematic way of quantifying the job market in Scotland and generally. We stumbled upon Adzuna, never heard of it? It’s quite c... [Read more...]

In part 1 I showed how to grab data from the forecast.io, now that we have all of that I want to use it to investigate the effects of weather on accidents. First, I realised after playing around a little that one possible way of doing this was as follows; ... [Read more...]

In part 1 I showed how to grab data from the forecast.io, now that we have all of that I want to use it to investigate the effects of weather on accidents. First, I realised after playing around a little that one possible way of doing this was as follo... [Read more...]

Blending weather data Scotland and other parts of the UK have some nicely curated open data on road traffic accidents. For individual cases, where and when they happened, how severe they were, the prevailing road conditions, which emergency services were involved and so on. It felt to me like this ... [Read more...]

Blending weather data Scotland and other parts of the UK have some nicely curated open data on road traffic accidents. For individual cases, where and when they happened, how severe they were, the prevailing road conditions, which emergency services w... [Read more...]

EDIT: Thanks to timvink for bringing to my attention library(ggrepel) which can be installed via devtools::install_github("slowkow/ggrepel"). It fixes the overlap of labels in the first figure below. Great! This is something I have been looking for! Last year in December, in time for the big ... [Read more...]

Last year in December, in time for the big release, myself and a colleague at The Data Lab were having some fun with an Star Wars character names that we had scraped from Wikipedia. Luckily for us a national outlet, The Scotsman picked up on this and put out an ... [Read more...]

I recently wrote a blog on trends and seasonal variation in fruit and veg wholesale prices provided by DEFRA. It was using a beatiful technique called ‘STL’ or seasonal-trend decomposition via loess[^1]. Just now I spotted a dataset from the Office for National Statistics on winter mortality. ONS highlight that: ... [Read more...]

I recently wrote a blog on trends and seasonal variation in fruit and veg wholesale prices provided by DEFRA. It was using a beatiful technique called ‘STL’ or seasonal-trend decomposition via loess[^1]. Just now I spotted a dataset from the Office... [Read more...]

I have been asked to access and present some of our own internal data, stored on a CRM system called Salesforce. Luckily for me someone had already written a set of R bindings for it (phew). As always thank a million to the authors of RForcecom, detail... [Read more...]

The twitteR library is one of the most comprehensive R bindings for an API that I have ever seen. Thanks a million to Jeff Gentry for authoring and maintaining it. It took me a while to get to know it and I thought I’d share a little trick here. ... [Read more...]

I have been asked to access and present some of our own internal data, stored on a CRM system called Salesforce. Luckily for me someone had already written a set of R bindings for it (phew). As always thank a million to the authors of RForcecom, details of which can ... [Read more...]

The twitteR library is one of the most comprehensive R bindings for an API that I have ever seen. Thanks a million to Jeff Gentry for authoring and maintaining it. It took me a while to get to know it and I thought I'd share a little trick here. I ... [Read more...]

I know I am probably late to this party but I recently found out about DBSCAN or "A Density-Based Algorithm for Discovering Clusters in Large Spatial Databases with Noise"[^1]. In a nutshell, the algorithm visits successive data point and asks whether neighbouring points are density-reachable. In other words is it ... [Read more...]

Just disovered the Jekyll - github pages combination. Perfect for a very simple static blog site. I also found a pretty neat integration with RMarkdown which suits me perfectly, as I am mainly using R and will be posting bits and pieces of that. A summary of how it works... ... [Read more...]