A post about simulating data from a generalized linear mixed model (GLMM), the fourth post in my simulations series involving linear models, is long overdue. I settled on a binomial example based on a binomial GLMM with a logit link. I find binomial models the most difficult to grok, primarily ...

In ggplot2, aesthetics and their scale_*() functions change both the plot appearance and the plot legend appearance simultaneously. The override.aes argument in guide_legend() allows the user to change only the legend appearance without affecting the rest of the plot. This is useful for making the legend more readable ...

Since I tend to work with relatively new R users, I think a lot about what folks need to know when they are getting started. Learning how to get help tops my list of essential skills. Some of this involves learning about useful help forums like Stac...

I was recently making some arrangements for the 2020 eclipse in South America, which of course got me thinking of the day we were lucky enough to have a path of totality come to us. We have a weather station that records local temperature every 5 minutes, so after the eclipse I ...

This summer I was asked to collaborate on an analysis project with many response variables. As usual, I planned on automating my initial graphical data exploration through the use of functions and purrr::map() as I’ve written about previously. However, this particular project was a follow-up to a previous ...

When we have many similar models to fit, automating at least some portions of the task can be a real time saver. In my last post I demonstrated how to make a function for model fitting. Once you have made such a function it’s possible to loop through variable ...

I worked with several students over the last few months who were fitting many linear models, all with the same basic structure but different response variables. They were struggling to find an efficient way to do this in R while still taking the time to check model assumptions. A first ...

There are a variety of ways to combine ggplot2 plots with a single shared axis. However, things can get tricky if you want a lot of control over all plot elements. I demonstrate three different approaches for this: 1. Using facets, which is built in to ggplot2 but doesn’t allow ...

The idea of embedded plots for visualizing a large dataset that has an overplotting problem recently came up in some discussions with students. I first learned about embedded graphics from package ggsubplot. You can still see an old post about that package and about embedded graphics in general, with examples. ...

In a recent lecture I gave a basic overview of zero-inflation in count distributions. My main take-home message to the students that I thought worth posting about here is that having a lot of zero values does not necessarily mean you have zero inflation. Zero inflation is when there are ...

Most analyses aren’t really done until we’ve found a way to visualize the results graphically, and I’ve recently been getting some questions from students on how to plot fitted lines from models. There are some R packages that are made specifically for this purpose; see packages effects ...

I periodically find myself having long conversations with consultees about 0’s. Why? Well, the basic suite of statistical tools many of us learn first involves the normal distribution (for the errors). The log transformation tends to feature prominently for working with right-skewed data. Since log(0) returns -Infinity, a common first ...

I’ve been trying to participate a little more in the R community outside of my narrow professional world, so when the co-organizer of the Eugene R Users Group invited me to come talk at one of their meet-ups I agreed (even though it involved public speaking! ????). I started out ...

When you have a lot of variables and need to make a lot exploratory plots it’s usually worthwhile to automate the process in R instead of manually copying and pasting code for every plot. However, the coding approach needed to automate plots can look pretty daunting to a beginner ...