Publications by Markus Gesmann

From the Guardian’s data blog: Visualising risk

20.04.2012

The Guardian published a nice summary and link collection of an interdisciplinary visualisation workshop hosted by Microsoft dedicated to visualising probability and risk. Check it out here.OECD better life indexThe links I found most interesting were those to the pages of Gregor Aisch and Moritz Stefaner. You may have come across the...

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Installing R packages without admin rights on MS Windows

26.04.2012

Is there a life outside the office?Photo: Markus GesmannIt is not unusual that you will not have admin rights in an IT controlled office environment. But then again the limitations set by the IT department can spark of some creativity. And I have to admit that I enjoy this kind of troubleshooting.The other day I ended up in front of a Windows PC ...

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Next Kölner R User Meeting: 6 July 2012

01.05.2012

The next Cologne R user group meeting is scheduled for 6 July 2012. All details are available on the new KölnRUG Meetup site. Please sign up if you would like to come along, and notice that there is also pub poll for the after “work” drinks. Notes from the first Cologne R user group meeting are available here.View Larger Map Related To le...

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Waterfall charts in style of The Economist with R

07.05.2012

Waterfall charts are sometimes quite helpful to illustrate the various moving parts in financial data, in particular where I have positive and negative values like a profit and loss statement (P&L). However, they can be a bit of a pain to produce in Excel. Not so in R, thanks to the waterfall package by James Howard. In combination with the latti...

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Interactive reports in R with knitr and RStudio

15.05.2012

Last Saturday I met the guys from RStudio at the R in Finance conference in Chicago. I was curious to find out what RStudio could offer. In the past I have used mostly Emacs + ESS for editing R files. Well, and what a surprise it was. JJ, Joe and Josh showed me a preview of version 0.96 of their software, which adds a close integration of Sweave ...

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End User Computing and why R can help meeting Solvency II

20.05.2012

John D. Cook gave a great talk about ‘Why and how people use R‘. The talk resonated with me and highlighted why R is such a great tool for end user computing. A topic which has become increasingly important in the European insurance industry.John’s main point on why people use R is that R gets the job done and I think he is spot on. Of cour...

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Interactive HTML presentation with R, googleVis, knitr, pandoc and slidy

29.05.2012

Tonight I will give a talk at the Cambridge R user group about googleVis. Following my good experience with knitr and RStudio to create interactive reports, I thought that I should try to create the slides in the same way as well. Christopher Gandrud’s recent post reminded me of deck.js, a JavaScript library for interactive html slides, which I...

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UK house prices visualised with googleVis-0.2.16

05.06.2012

A new version of googleVis has been released on CRAN and the project site. Version 0.2.16 adds the functionality to plot quarterly and monthly data as a motion chart. To illustrate the new feature I looked for a quarterly data set and stumbled across the quarterly UK house price data published by Nationwide, a building society. The data is availa...

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Transforming subsets of data in R with by, ddply and data.table

11.06.2012

Transforming data sets with R is usually the starting point of my data analysis work. Here is a scenario which comes up from time to time: transform subsets of a data frame, based on context given in one or a combination of columns.As an example I use a data set which shows sales figures by product for a number of years:df <- data.frame(Product=g...

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Dynamical systems in R with simecol

18.06.2012

This evening I will talk about Dynamical systems in R with simecol at the LondonR meeting. Thanks to the work by Thomas Petzoldt, Karsten Rinke, Karline Soetaert and R. Woodrow Setzer it is really straight forward to model and analyse dynamical systems in R with their deSolve and simecol packages.I will give a brief overview of the functionality ...

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