Exponential decays can describe many physical phenomena: capacitor discharge, temperature of a billet during cooling, kinetics of first order chemical reactions, radioactive decay, and so on. They are very useful functions, but can be tricky to fit in R: you’ll quickly run into a “singular gradient” error. Thankfully, self-starting ... [Read more...]

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I recently needed to fit curves on several sets of similar data, measured from different sensors. I found how to achieve this with dplyr, without needing to define outside functions or use for-loops. This approach integrates perfectly with my usual dplyr and ggplot2 workflows, which means it adapts to new ... [Read more...]

“Four? That’s barely your average family murder-suicide!” - Anonymous American The United States saw 427 mass shootings in 2017, making a total of 2571 victims. That’s more than one shooting per day. Why don’t you hear about them on the news every day? Or conversely, if they are so common, ... [Read more...]

I recently wanted to add a Google Analytics tracker to a Shiny dashboard, and I found that the official documentation doesn’t explain how to include “Global Site Tag” tracking code, which seems to be the current default setting in Analytics. The process is simple, we just have to include ... [Read more...]

It took me a surprising amount of time to find how to change the tick interval on ggplot2 datetime axes, without manually specifying the date of each position. The solution is surprisingly simple and clear once you know the syntax: scale_x_datetime(date_breaks = "12 hours") This places a break ... [Read more...]