Publications by David Smith
Flowchart: How to learn survey analysis with R
In a recent talk to the DC R User Group, Anthony Damico presented the following handy flowchart for learning to do survey analysis with R (actually, it's a pretty good flowchart for learning R for any application): Since they're not clickable above, here are the resource links: Learn R by watching two‐minute videos on http://twotorials.com R...
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Visualizing MLB Hall of Fame votes with R
Carlos Scheidegger and Kenny Shirley created this visualization of votes for the Major League Baseball hall of fame: They describe the chart as follows: The main figure above is a plot of BBWAA Hall of Fame voting by year for all 1,070 players who have appeared on the ballot since Hall of Fame voting began in 1936. The circular points repr...
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Visualizing networks in R: arc diagrams and hive plots
Arc diagrams are an alternate way of representing two-dimensional graphs. Rather than scattering the nodes across the page connected by straight edges, you can instead arrange the nodes along a one-dimensional axis, and replace the straight edges with arcs between the nodes. While an arc diagram might not give as good a sense of the connections b...
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Learn about R through data mining
If you're in San Francisco for this week's DeveloperWeek conference, our own Joe Rickert will also giving a presentation on Wednesday at 2:10PM on Predictive Modeling with Big Data in R which will feature several demos of data mining massive data sets using the Revolution R Enterprise. Incidentally, the whole team Revolution Analytics was proud ...
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Make building R packages easier with devtools
If you're writing any significant amount of R code, you might want to start think about bundling it up into packages. An R package combines functions, data, documentation and unit tests, and is a convenient and reliable system to manage and version collections of R content that could otherwise become unwieldy. And if you want to share your code w...
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Analyze web traffic data with Google Analytics and R
If you run an e-commerce site, blog or other web property there's a good chance you use Google Analytics to monitor traffic, look at visitor sources, and measure conversions. And while Google Analytics is quite powerful at looking at historic activity on your site, it lacks much in the way of predictive analytics. That's where R shines of course,...
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Keep up with new R questions on StackOverflow with @StackOverflowR
Last time I checked on the number of R questions on StackOverflow, back in June 2011, there were 5000. Today, there are 23,649. (For comparison, there are 15,649 questions about Matlab and 971 questions on SAS.) If you use Twitter, thanks to Trey Causey there's now an easy way to keep up with new R questions posted to StackOverflow. Just foll...
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Did an Excel error bring down the London Whale?
When JP Morgan Chase announced it had lost more than 2 billion dollars on the capital markets back in May 2012, many pointed to the actions of rogue trader Bruno Iksil as the cause. But was the “London Whale” — the nickname he was given by other traders for his outsized positions — the victim not of hubris, but a simple spreadsheet err...
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In case you missed it: January 2103 Roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from January of particular interest to R users. Anthony Damico created an amusing and useful flowchart for finding resources for learning R, especially for survey analysis. All R users: please be counted for the 2013 Rexer Data Miner Survey (R was the #1 software reported in the last survey). Rela...
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Make a Valentine’s Heart with R
If you haven't sent your loved one a Valentine's Day greeting yet, it's not too late! Thanks to Guillermo Santos who pointed out an R script from Berkeley's Concepts in Computing with Data course, I created the following Valentine's Day card for my husband: If you want to make one for your loved one, you can use the R code below (which I modifi...
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