Abstract In this post, I will analyse the data I scraped and put into an R package, which I called {nethack}. NetHack is a roguelike game; for more context, read my previous blog post. You can install the {nethack} package and play around with the data yourself by installing it ... [Read more...]

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Abstract You can find the data used in this blog post here: https://github.com/b-rodrigues/elections_lux This is a follow up to a previous blog post where I extracted data of the 2018 Luxembourguish elections from Excel Workbooks. Now that I have the data, I will create a map ... [Read more...]

In this blog post, similar to a previous blog post I am going to show you how we can go from an Excel workbook that contains data to flat file. I will taking advantage of the structure of the tables inside the Excel sheets by writing a function that extracts ... [Read more...]

I was recently confronted to the following problem: creating hundreds of plots that could still be edited by our client. What this meant was that I needed to export the graphs in Excel or Powerpoint or some other such tool that was familiar to the client, and not export the ... [Read more...]

In a previous blog post I have showed how you could use the {tidyxl} package to go from a human readable Excel Workbook to a tidy data set (or flat file, as they are also called). Some people then contributed their solutions, which is always something I really enjoy when ... [Read more...]

I won’t write a very long introduction; we all know that Excel is ubiquitous in business, and that it has a lot of very nice features, especially for business practitioners that do not know any programming. However, when people use Excel for purposes it was not designed for, it ... [Read more...]

I’ve been using GNU+Linux distros for about 10 years now, and have settled for openSUSE as my main operating system around 3 years ago, perhaps even more. If you’re a gamer, you might have heard about SteamOS and how more and more games are available on GNU+Linux. I ... [Read more...]

First of all, is it heteroskedasticity or heteroscedasticity? According to McCulloch (1985), heteroskedasticity is the proper spelling, because when transliterating Greek words, scientists use the Latin letter k in place of the Greek letter κ (kappa). κ sometimes is transliterated as the Latin letter c, but only when these words entered the English ... [Read more...]

In this blog post I will discuss missing data imputation and instrumental variables regression. This is based on a short presentation I will give at my job. You can find the data used here on this website: http://eclr.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/index.php/IV_in_R The data ... [Read more...]

I’ve been measuring my weight almost daily for almost 2 years now; I actually started earlier, but not as consistently. The goal of this blog post is to get re-acquaiented with time series; I haven’t had the opportunity to work with time series for a long time now and ... [Read more...]

It is often the case that data is trapped inside pdfs, but thankfully there are ways to extract it from the pdfs. A very nice package for this task is pdftools (Github link) and this blog post will describe some basic functionality from that package. First, let’s find some ... [Read more...]

Yesterday I wrote this blog post which showed how one could use {furrr} and {mice} to impute missing data in parallel, thus speeding up the process tremendously. To make using this snippet of code easier, I quickly cobbled together an experimental package called {pmice} that you can install from Github: {{... [Read more...]

Today I saw this tweet on my timeline: For those of us that just can't wait until RStudio officially supports parallel purrr in #rstats, boy have I got something for you. Introducing `furrr`, parallel purrr through the use of futures. Go ahead, break things, you know you want to:https://... [Read more...]

I have added a new function to my {brotools} package, called describe(), which takes a data frame as an argument, and returns another data frame with descriptive statistics. It is very much inspired by the {skmir} package but also by assist::describe() (click on the packages to be redirected to ... [Read more...]

This is going to be the type of blog posts that would perhaps be better as a gist, but it is easier for me to use my blog as my own personal collection of gists. Plus, someone else might find this useful, so here it is! In this blog post ... [Read more...]

Sometimes you need to call an api to get some result from a web service, but sometimes this call might fail. You might get an error 500 for example, or maybe you’re making too many calls too fast. Regarding this last point, I really encourage you to read Ethics in ... [Read more...]

Disclaimer: the first part of this blog post draws heavily from Working with CSVs on the Command Line, which is a beautiful resource that lists very nice tips and tricks to work with CSV files before having to load them into R, or any other statistical software. I highly recommend ... [Read more...]

In this blog post, I am going to train a random forest on census data from the US to predict the probability that someone is looking for a job. To this end, I downloaded the US 1990 census data from the UCI Machine Learning Repository. Having a background in economics, I ... [Read more...]

This week I had the opportunity to teach R at my workplace, again. This course was the “advanced R” course, and unlike the one I taught at the end of last year, I had one more day (so 3 days in total) where I could show my colleagues the joys of ... [Read more...]