Publications by GivenTheData
R and the web (for beginners), Part I: How is the local nuclear plant doing?
One of the things I especially like about R is its ability to easily access and process data from the web. If you are new to R, or never have used it to access data from the Internet, here is the first part of a little series of posts with examples to get you started. This first post gives a very simple example of how to access a data set that is...
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R and the web (for beginners), Part II: XML in R
This second post of my little series on R and the web deals with how to access and process XML-data with R. XML is a markup language that is commonly used to interchange data over the Internet. If you want to access some online data over a webpage’s API you are likely to get it in XML format. So here is a very simple example of how to deal with...
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R and the web (for beginners), Part III: Scraping MPs’ expenses in detail from the web
In this last post of my little series (see my latest post) on R and the web I explain how to extract data of a website (web scraping/screen scraping) with R. If the data you want to analyze are a part of a web page, for example a HTML-table (or hundreds of them) it might be very time-consuming (and boring!) to manually copy/paste all of its co...
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Estimating Pi with R via MCS-Dart: A very simple example of numerical integration, illustrated and computed in R.
Have you ever played Monte Carlo Dart? If not, read this post and learn how to do it with R and what it can be used for. In fact it is a very easy and prevalent example (which I have come across in a computational economics course last spring semester) that demonstrates the idea behind numerical integration. The aim of this post is not to prese...
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My R-Package Development Cheat Sheet
In case you have no experience in writing an R-package yourself but would like to start developing one right away, this post might be helpful.I’m about to finish my first own (serious) R-package these days (more on the package itself later). While writing my package, I collected a handful of commands and notes etc. that proofed to...
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Data Science in Business/Computational Social Science in Academia?
Nomen Est Omen?Lately, the terms “data science” and “data scientist” turn up at an increasing pace in the R-blog-sphere. Since its first occurrence (to my knowledge, “data scientist” has been coined by DJ Patil and Jeff Hammerbacher in 2008), the term “data scientist” has become established and accepted not only in the data-blo...
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