Background Anyone who has created wordclouds for a presentation before will know that it is an iterative process. Not only do you have to remove “useless” stop words (e.g. the, at, am), you may also need to process word stemming so that words with the same stem do not ...

Background One of the pet projects that I had been working on earlier in the year was to figure out an efficient way to gain an insight into what is going on in a consumer market, e.g.: What do people look for when they’re buying a product? What ...

What’s the best way to learn R? Motivations behind the debate Some argue that R fundamentally has a steep learning curve, and that there are no real shortcuts for learning R. I don’t completely agree with that: I think that there are easier way...

Excel dashboards are great… what? ???? For all the complaints that people have for Excel, it still has many clear, indisputable advantages. For one, it is extremely accessible - almost everyone has Excel installed on their computer. It’s familiar...

Should we use magrittr pipes with data.table? Why ask the question? If you are fairly new to R, you might find it puzzling / intriguing that R questions on Stack Overflow tend to attract a range of solutions which all have different syntax “styles”, but almost all seem to be ...

A favourite R package? Whenever I’m asked the question of what my favourite R package is, I often go through this reasoning: tidyverse packages, such as dplyr and tidyr, are what I’d call “essentials” i.e. packages that I would always load for almost every piece of analysis ...

Why start a R blog? Ever since I discovered r-bloggers and had subsequently learnt immensely from the articles contributed by R users all around the world, I’ve wanted to start a R blog myself. Part of the motivation is give back to the open sourc...