Publications by Mark T Patterson
ddply in action
Top Batting Averages Over Time Top Batting Averages Over Time reference:http://www.baseball-databank.org/ ShortI'm going to use plyr and ggplot2 to look at how top batting averages have changed over time First load the data: options(width = 100) library(ggplot2) ## Warning message: package 'ggplot2' was built under R version 2.14.2 library(pl...
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Using maps and ggplot2 to visualize college hockey championships
Short: I plot the frequency of college hockey championships by state using the maps package, and ggplot2 Note: this example is based heavily on the example provided athttp://www.dataincolour.com/2011/07/maps-with-ggplot2/ data reference:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCAA_Men%27s_Ice_Hockey_Championship Question of interestAs a good Minnesotan, ...
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Behavioral Economics and Beer… highly correlated
Short: I plot the frequency of wikipedia searches of “Behavioral Economics”, and “Beer” – who knew the correlation would be 0.7! Data reference:Data on any wikipedia searches (back to 2007) are available at http://glimmer.rstudio.com/pssguy/wikiSearchRates/. The website allows you to download frequency hits per day as a csv, which i...
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CrossFit weights: gender matters less than you’d think
Exploring Gaussian Mixture Models Exploring Gaussian Mixture Models This week in the Empirical Research Methods course, we've been talking a lot about measurement error. The idea of having some latent variable of interest, coupled with 'flawed' measures reminded me of a section of Cosma's course I really enjoyed, but haven't gotten a change to g...
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Simulation of an Oxford (Undergrad) Interview Question
A friend of mine, who's an economics teacher in London, is responsible for preparing some of his students for interviews at Oxford and Cambridge. He told me that, at these schools, students have to go through a nerve-wracking experience where faculty pepper them with quiz questions meant to assess the ability to think quickly under pressure. ...
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Quarterback Wonderlic Scores by Institution (Academic) Strength
## geom_smooth: method="auto" and size of largest group is <1000, so using ## loess. Use 'method = x' to change the smoothing method. I remember my dad telling me that when he was at Northwestern in the mid-70s, the team was essentially winless. As a small consolation, he remembered that the football team had actually been full of good studen...
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Simulating Abstract Art with R
Piet Mondrian Composition with Red, Blue, Black, Yellow, and Gray (1921): An example draw from my simulation function: We're in the midst of planning our spring course on Empirical Research Methods, and as a result, I've found myself spending a lot of time thinking about some of the fist ideas in statistics – For example, that the data we ob...
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Using R to find Obama’s most frequent twitter hashtags
I've been exploring Jeff Gentry's twitteR package, which has a ton of great functionality for intereacting with twitter data in R. Today, I thought a bit about a problem I've noticed several times on twitter: users profiles are often only noisy signals of the content they tweet about! I decided that a table of a user's commonly-used tweets migh...
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College Basketball: Presence in the NBA over Time
Interested in practicing a bit of web-scraping, I decided to make use of a nice dataset provided by Databasebasketball.com in order to examine the representation of various college programs in the NBA/ABA over time. This dataset only includes retired players, and ends in 2010, so I decided to only plot data through 2000. Originally, I was exci...
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Visualizing Twitter Followers Using Pointillism
A funny thing about social media in the 21st century is that it allows us to connect with a lot of people.. by a lot, I mean so many that it's easy to lose track of any sense of scale. Maybe others are better at this, but I have a hard time wrapping my head around what (say) 8,000 twitter followers looks like. To try to get a grip on this, I ...
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