Publications by Adventures in Data
A new blogging workflow
Just disovered the Jekyll – github pages combination. Perfect for a very simple static blog site. I also found a pretty neat integration with RMarkdown which suits me perfectly, as I am mainly using R and will be posting bits and pieces of that. A summary of how it works… Install Jekyll on a local directory and build the site on your disk. ...
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Geographic clustering of UK cities
I know I am probably late to this party but I recently found out about DBSCAN or “A Density-Based Algorithm for Discovering Clusters in Large Spatial Databases with Noise”[^1]. In a nutshell, the algorithm visits successive data point and asks whether neighbouring points are density-reachable. In other words is it possible to connect two poi...
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Extracting data from Salesforce
I have been asked to access and present some of our own internal data, stored on a CRM system called Salesforce. Luckily for me someone had already written a set of R bindings for it (phew). As always thank a million to the authors of RForcecom, details of which can be found here. A while ago, I was struggling to extract data from objects because...
1316 sym R (441 sym/4 pcs)
Downloading your twitter feed in R
The twitteR library is one of the most comprehensive R bindings for an API that I have ever seen. Thanks a million to Jeff Gentry for authoring and maintaining it. It took me a while to get to know it and I thought I’d share a little trick here. I recently wanted to trace the generation of my personal data from a morning in my life (possibly mo...
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Extracting data from Salesforce
I have been asked to access and present some of our own internal data, stored on a CRM system called Salesforce. Luckily for me someone had already written a set of R bindings for it (phew). As always thank a million to the authors of RForcecom, details of which can be found here. A while ago, I was struggling to extract data from objects because...
1312 sym R (441 sym/4 pcs)
Downloading your twitter feed in R
The twitteR library is one of the most comprehensive R bindings for an API that I have ever seen. Thanks a million to Jeff Gentry for authoring and maintaining it. It took me a while to get to know it and I thought I'd share a little trick here. I recently wanted to trace the generation of my personal data from a morning in my life (possibly more...
1387 sym R (562 sym/4 pcs)
Seasonal mortality trend decomposition
I recently wrote a blog on trends and seasonal variation in fruit and veg wholesale prices provided by DEFRA. It was using a beatiful technique called ‘STL’ or seasonal-trend decomposition via loess[^1]. Just now I spotted a dataset from the Office for National Statistics on winter mortality. ONS highlight that: last winter was a particularl...
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Seasonal mortality trend decomposition
I recently wrote a blog on trends and seasonal variation in fruit and veg wholesale prices provided by DEFRA. It was using a beatiful technique called ‘STL’ or seasonal-trend decomposition via loess[^1]. Just now I spotted a dataset from the Office for National Statistics on winter mortality. ONS highlight that: last winter was a particula...
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Language categorisation of Star Wars character names
EDIT: Thanks to timvink for bringing to my attention library(ggrepel) which can be installed via devtools::install_github("slowkow/ggrepel"). It fixes the overlap of labels in the first figure below. Great! This is something I have been looking for! Last year in December, in time for the big release, myself and a colleague at The Data Lab were ha...
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Language categorisation of Star Wars character names
Last year in December, in time for the big release, myself and a colleague at The Data Lab were having some fun with an Star Wars character names that we had scraped from Wikipedia. Luckily for us a national outlet, The Scotsman picked up on this and put out an article on their website. We had the idea one lunch time to attempt to cluster the Sta...
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