A pint of R plotted an interesting dataset: intentional homicides in South America. I thought the graphs were pretty but I was unhappy about the way information was conveyed in the plots; relative risk should be very important but number … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Zack Abrahamson, the "data whiz" at political analysis site Politico, is apparently an R user. Politico's Feb 10 2012 chart of the day clearly uses the ggplot2 graphics package and (quoting Politico) looks into the disenchanted slice of the GOP that’s not engaged with its party’s primary. And that slice ... [Read more...]

Many thanks to Hadley Wickham for his informative and entertaining webinar yesterday, "A backstage tour of ggplot2". Thanks also to everyone who submitted questions -- with more than 800 attendees live on the line we had many more questions than we had time to answer. For more ggplot2 information, Hadley kindly ... [Read more...]

James Cheshire, R user and lecturer at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, created this map of the most trafficked cycle routes in London: Click to enlarge, it's a gorgeous chart. The bicycle traffic data comes from London's public cycle-hire facility, which currently is only available in central London (... [Read more...]

If you're a Twitter user like me, you're probably familiar with the way that conversations can easily by tracked by following the #hashtag that participants include in the tweets to label the topic. But what causes some topics to take off, and others to die on the vine? Does the ... [Read more...]

Page 7 of Facebook's 213-page S-1 filing for their record-breaking IPO includes the following chart, under the headline: "Our Mission: To make the world more open and connected". This chart was created using the R language and Hadoop by Facebook intern Paul Butler. (Thanks to the blog IOER Tools for first ... [Read more...]

Hadley Wickham, creator of the ggplot2 packages for R (as well as several others) will present a webinar on February 8 going behind the scenes of the popular graphics package. If you've never used ggplot2 before, this will be a great way to learn about the kinds of charts you can ... [Read more...]

A few days ago, Romain François explained how to interface with the Facebook Graph API explorer with R. This was a low-level interface, giving the R programmer the ability to the raw data that Facebook can provide about your connections. Now, just four days later, the first application in ... [Read more...]

Last Saturday, the New York Times published a feature article on the wealthiest 1% of Americans. The on-line version of the article included interactive features like this interactive map showing where your household ranks in the country and in local regions. The print edition, however, included some different (and necessarily static) ... [Read more...]

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If you've been following the presidential primary process here in the US, you've probably seen many maps of the results of the Iowa caucuses by now (such as this infamous one from Fox News). But you might be interested to learn how such maps can be made using the R ... [Read more...]

Since 4th September 2010 we have had over 2,800 quakes (considering only magnitude 3+) in Christchurch. Quakes come in swarms, with one or few strong shocks, followed by numerous smaller ones and then the ocasional shock, creating an interesting data … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Mortgage rates are low, considering historical rates for the last 50 years. It may be timely to consider a mortgage refinance. The image above links to a simple tool for exploring mortgage refinance, built using rapache and the yet-to-be-archived yarr package for R. Hence, there are now two mortgage-related calculators on ... [Read more...]

The choropleth below (created by Baptiste Coulmont) is a sort of prosperity map of France: the blue areas have high levels of personal income (actually, median household income tax paid divided by the number of household members), while the red areas have the lowest: The map was created with the ... [Read more...]

R user Josh Reich, who we've featured here on the blog before, is also the CEO and co-founder of the new user-friendly bank, Simple. (Confidential to Josh -- still waiting on my invite...). So it's no suprise that Simple's logo is rendered using the R language: wave [Read more...]

Vote Compass is an online "electoral literacy application, whose goal is to encourage engagement with and stimulate discussion around the policy platforms of Canada's political parties. In the lead-up to the 2011 Canadian election, Vote Compass collected the results of an on-line 10-minute survey from more than 2 million participants, and used ... [Read more...]

This popular article references a report by financial consulting firms that makes a fairly convincing argument (even though they mostly neglect inferential statistics, and some parts of their argument are misleading, or otherwise not convincing) that 401(k) participants who accept "help" from financial experts take less risk and have better ... [Read more...]

Here's a cool application of calendar heat maps: runner Andy used R to catalogue his daily running mileage over the last 2+ years: There are lots of ways to chart data like this (a simple time-series chart, for example), but sometimes looking at data in new ways offers fresh perspectives. For ... [Read more...]

PhD student Caroline Tucker created a Hallowe'en card using the R graphics system: You can find the R code to create the above image here. Note that you'll need to install the fields and MBA packages first. One interesting aspect of the code is the use of the mba.surf ... [Read more...]

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