Ok so I have now done two iterations on a better way to visualize term frequencies using R, ggplot2 and plyr. The first was ok but ugly, the second was better but still ugly. How to read it: Frequency is segmented in to 20% quantiles The frequency is on the y ... [Read more...]

Here is an alternative to word clouds that makes it easier to get insights, but also has some of the aesthetic appeal of the traditional word cloud. My first attempt at this looked pretty bad and this is not too much better, but hopefully someone else will help improve it. ... [Read more...]

Someone recently asked on twitter about about peoples' preferences for cloud generators in R. I replied that I thought the "null" word cloud generator was best. By this I mean that I think the word cloud is a bad visualization method. Why? Here is one article with a good perspective, ... [Read more...]

Selecting subsets of a data.frame is easy in R if you define the predicates manually. But if you need to define many conditions the standard slicing and subsetting methods are cumbersome. For this illustration I want to pick some large number of numerical ranges and label all of the ... [Read more...]

This is an illustration of representing point count in a graphic using transparency. This is easy to do in ggplot2 if you use one of the barchart type of geoms.  However I think there are other situations where it would be useful to apply aesthetics based on point count. Since ... [Read more...]

psych::pairs.panels and corrgram::corrgram using mtcars data Core Ideas: multivariate modeling is challenging pair plots make it easy to get a quick understanding of each variable and the relationships between them Multivariate analysis and modeling can be really challenging. Getting the job done well requires you to know ... [Read more...]

I’ve been a big fan of ggplot2 for a long time but plyr has been in my toolkit for less than a year and it is now one of my most-used R packages. It is how aggregate/*apply would have been if they were awesome. In five lines this ... [Read more...]

I just started a new job (working on social search awesomeness at Bing) and so I had to set up my “dev” environment with all of my usual tools (R, python,vim,etc). One thing that made this a bit easier is my habit of keeping an R script around ... [Read more...]

R works in many ways and on many different OSes which is great, but it also means that if you share a piece of code the recipient may need to install packages to make it work. One thing that I do (adapted from a trick my friend Paul Jin showed ... [Read more...]