Publications by Ian
A Spatial Data Analysis GUI for R
I am excited to announce the addition of DeducerSpatial to the Deducer plug-in ecosystem. DeducerSpatial is a graphical user interface for the visualization and analysis of spatial data, built on Deducer’s plug-in platform. In a previous post I illustrated how to user DeducerSpatial from the command line to add Open Street Map images to your R ...
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Words in Politics: Some extensions of the word cloud
The word cloud is a commonly used plot to visualize a speech or set of documents in a succinct way. I really like them. They can be extremely visually pleasing, and you can spend a lot of time perusing over the words gaining new insights. That said, they don’t convey a great deal of information. From a statistical perspective, a word cloud is...
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Plot maps like a boss
A new package OpenStreetMap has been released to CRAN this week which is designed to allow you to easily add satellite imagery, or open street maps to your plots. Raster maps are a great way to add context to your spatial data with a minimum outlay of effort. The syntax in OpenStreetMap is fairly simple, just give it a bounding box in lat/long ...
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Updates to the Deducer family of packages
Over the past month there have been a number of package updates in the deducer ecosystem. Deducer is a general purpose, extensible, data analysis GUI. It is designed to be a free easy to use alternative to proprietary data analysis software such as SPSS, JMP, and Minitab. It has a menu system to do common data manipulation and analysis tasks, and...
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Eclipse + Rcpp + RInside = Magic
I’ve been doing R/Java development for some time, creating packages both large and small with this tool chain. I have used Eclipse as my package development environment almost exclusively, but I didn’t realize how much I relied on the IDE before I had to do some serious R/C++ package development. My first Rcpp package (wordcloud) only used a...
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Deducer.org reaches 250,000 page views and continues to grow
It is difficult for R package authors to know how much (if at all) their packages are being used. CRAN does not calculate or make public download statistics (though this might change in the relatively near future), so authors can’t tell if 10 or 10,000 people are using their work. Deducer is in much the same boat. We can’t know how many peo...
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R for Dummies – a quick review of reviews
The book R for Dummies was released recently, and was just reviewed by Dirk Eddelbuettel in the Journal of Statistical Software. Dirk is an R luminary, creating such fantastic works as Rcpp. R for Dummies seems to have beaten Dirk’s natural disinclination to like anything with “for Dummies” appended to it, receiving a pretty positive...
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wordcloud makes words less cloudy
An update to the wordcloud package (2.2) has been released to CRAN. It includes a number of improvements to the basic wordcloud. Notably that you may now pass it text and Corpus objects directly. as in: #install.packages(c("wordcloud","tm"),repos="http://cran.r-project.org") library(wordcloud) library(tm) wordcloud("May our children and our chi...
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How the Democrats may have won the House, but lost the seats
The 2012 election is over and in the books. A few very close races remain to be officially decided, but for the most part everything has settled down over the last week. By all accounts it was a very good night for the Democrats, with wins in the presidency, senate and state houses. They also performed better than expected in the House of Repre...
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Climate: Misspecified
I’m usually quite a big fan of the content syndicated on R-Bloggers (as this post is), but I came across a post yesterday that was as statistically misguided as it was provocative. In this post, entitled “The Surprisingly Weak Case for Global Warming,” the author (Matt Asher) claims that the trend toward hotter average global temperature...
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