Articles by beckmw

Predicting tides in R

April 12, 2017 | beckmw

Skip to TL/DR…. Water movement in estuaries is affected by many processes acting across space and time. Tidal exchange with the ocean is an important hydrodynamic process that can define several characteristics of an estuary. Physical flushing rates and water circulation are often controlled by tidal advection, whereas chemical ...
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SWMPr 2.1.0 on CRAN

August 12, 2015 | beckmw

I’ve just released an updated version of my package for estuary monitoring data, SWMPr, available on CRAN. I’ve made several additions to the package since it’s initial release – nothing too crazy but enough to warrant another push to CRAN and blog post. I’ve been pretty bad ...
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Reinventing the wheel for ordination biplots with ggplot2

May 14, 2015 | beckmw

I’ll be the first to admit that the topic of plotting ordination results using ggplot2 has been visited many times over. As is my typical fashion, I started creating a package for this purpose without completely searching for existing solutions. Specifically, the ggbiplot and factoextra packages already provide almost ...
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SWMPr 2.0.0 now on CRAN

April 5, 2015 | beckmw

I’m pleased to announce that my second R package, SWMPr, has been posted on CRAN. I developed this package to work with water quality time series data from the System Wide Monitoring Program (SWMP) of the National Estuarine Research Reserve System (NERRS). SWMP was established in 1995 to provide continuous ...
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NeuralNetTools 1.0.0 now on CRAN

December 20, 2014 | beckmw

After successfully navigating the perilous path of CRAN submission, I’m pleased to announce that NeuralNetTools is now available!  From the description file, the package provides visualization and analysis tools to aid in the interpretation of neural networks, including functions for plotting, variable importance, and sensitivity analyses. I’ve written ...
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Back to square one – R and RStudio installation

September 28, 2014 | beckmw

I remember my first experience installing R. Basic installation can be humbling for someone not familiar with mirror networks or file binaries. I remember not knowing the difference between base and contrib… which one to select? The concept of CRAN and mirrors was also new to me. Which location do ...
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Some love for ggplot2

August 25, 2014 | beckmw

With all the recent buzz about ggvis (this, this, and this) it’s often easy to forget all that ggplot2 offers as a graphics package. True, ggplot is a static approach to graphing unlike ggvis but it has fundamentally changed the way we think about plots in R. I recently ... [Read more...]

Average dissertation and thesis length, take two

July 15, 2014 | beckmw

About a year ago I wrote a post describing average length of dissertations at the University of Minnesota. I've been meaning to expand that post by adding data from masters theses since the methods for gathering/parsing the records are transferable. This post provides some graphics and links to R ...
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A simple workflow for using R with Microsoft Office products

June 5, 2014 | beckmw

The challenge of integrating Microsoft products with R software has been an outstanding issue for several years. Reasons for these issues are complicated and related to fundamental differences in developing proprietary vs open-source products. To date, I don’t believe there has been a satisfactory solution but I present this ...
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How much code have you written?

May 3, 2014 | beckmw

This past week I attended the National Water Quality Monitoring Conference in Cincinnati. Aside from spending my time attending talks, workshops, and meeting like-minded individuals, I spent an unhealthy amount of time in the hotel bar working on this blog post. My past experiences mixing coding and beer have suggested ... [Read more...]

Process and observation uncertainty explained with R

March 31, 2014 | beckmw

Once up on a time I had grand ambitions of writing blog posts outlining all of the examples in the Ecological Detective.1 A few years ago I participated in a graduate seminar series where we went through many of the examples in this book. I am not a population biologist ... [Read more...]

Brief introduction on Sweave and Knitr for reproducible research

February 24, 2014 | beckmw

A few weeks ago I gave a presentation on using Sweave and Knitr under the guise of promoting reproducible research. I humbly offer this presentation to the blog with full knowledge that there are already loads of tutorials available online. This presentation is specific and slightly biased towards Windows OS, ... [Read more...]

A brief foray into parallel processing with R

January 21, 2014 | beckmw

I’ve recently been dabbling with parallel processing in R and have found the foreach package to be a useful approach to increasing efficiency of loops. To date, I haven’t had much of a need for these tools but I’ve started working with large datasets that can be ... [Read more...]

Visualizing neural networks in R – update

November 14, 2013 | beckmw

In my last post I said I wasn’t going to write anymore about neural networks (i.e., multilayer feedforward perceptron, supervised ANN, etc.). That was a lie. I’ve received several requests to update the neural network plotting function described in the original post. As previously explained, R does ... [Read more...]

Sensitivity analysis for neural networks

October 7, 2013 | beckmw

I’ve made quite a few blog posts about neural networks and some of the diagnostic tools that can be used to ‘demystify’ the information contained in these models. Frankly, I’m kind of sick of writing about neural networks but I wanted to share one last tool I’ve ... [Read more...]

A nifty area plot (or a bootleg of a ggplot geom)

September 17, 2013 | beckmw

The ideas for most of my blogs usually come from half-baked attempts to create some neat or useful feature that hasn’t been implemented in R. These ideas might come from some analysis I’ve used in my own research or from some other creation meant to save time. More ... [Read more...]

Variable importance in neural networks

August 12, 2013 | beckmw

If you’re a regular reader of my blog you’ll know that I’ve spent some time dabbling with neural networks. As I explained here, I’ve used neural networks in my own research to develop inference into causation. Neural networks fall under two general categories that describe their ... [Read more...]

(Another) introduction to R

May 27, 2013 | beckmw

It’s Memorial Day and my dissertation defense is tomorrow. This week I’m phoning in my blog. I had the opportunity to teach a short course last week that was part of a larger workshop focused on ecosystem restoration. A fellow grad student and I taught a session on ... [Read more...]

Integration take two – Shiny application

May 13, 2013 | beckmw

My last post discussed a technique for integrating functions in R using a Monte Carlo or randomization approach. The mc.int function (available here) estimated the area underneath a curve by multiplying the proportion of random points below the curve by the total area covered by points within the interval: ... [Read more...]
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