Publications by Patrick Burns
A first step towards R from spreadsheets
Move your data analysis to a computing environment specifically designed for it. Why R and not spreadsheets? Here are three reasons: complexity graphics money Spreadsheets are easily overwhelmed. Very complex things can be done in spreadsheets — it is just that complex spreadsheets are inefficient and dangerous. Graphics should be consider...
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The joy of data analysis
Music and snow. Poke my eyes out Perhaps your immediate response is: “I’d rather poke my eyes out with a burning stick than do data analysis.” There’s a completely different reaction from a lot of people who have experienced data analysis. Music It’s not entirely clear why humans like music so much. Part of it may be the guessing game w...
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Translating between R and SQL: the basics
An introductory comparison of using the two languages. Background R was made especially for data analysis and graphics. SQL was made especially for databases. They are allies. The data structure in R that most closely matches a SQL table is a data frame. The terms rows and columns are used in both. A mashup There is an R package called sqld...
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A statistical review of ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ by Daniel Kahneman
I failed to find Kahneman’s book in the economics section of the bookshop, so I had to ask where it was. ”Oh, that’s in the psychology section.” It should have also been in the statistics section. He states that his collaboration with Amos Tversky started with the question: Are humans good intuitive statisticians? The wrong brain The...
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Blog recap of 2013
Posts by page views Interview with a forced convert to R from Matlab A first step towards R from spreadsheets Plot ranges of data in R A statistical review of ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ by Daniel Kahneman The 3 dots construct in R Translating between R and SQL: the basics An R debugging example R database interfaces R and social media On the ...
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From spreadsheet thinking to R thinking
Towards the basic R mindset. Previously The post “A first step towards R from spreadsheets” provides an introduction to switching from spreadsheets to R. It also includes a list of additional posts (like this one) on the transition. Add two columns Figure 1 shows some numbers in two columns and the start of adding those two columns to each ...
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An xts R Inferno-ism
Another of the all ye entering here. Issue When subscripting an xts object, columns that don’t exist in the object are silently ignored. Example First, create an xts object: xtx <- xts(cbind(a=1:4, b=11:14, c=21:24), order=Sys.Date() + 1:4) which looks like: > xtx a b c 2014-02-07 1 11 21 2014-02-08 2 12 22 2014-02-09 3 13 23 2014-...
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The TaoTeProgramming R package
I’d like to do a song of great social and political import. The code that created the illustrations in Tao Te Programming is now available as the TaoTeProgramming package on CRAN. The sea is just flat hills And they are both just smooth mountains. The package contains just over 1000 lines of code. More than half of that is the functions tha...
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21 R navigation tools
Navigation gets you from where you are to where you want to be. Speaking of navigation, you can jump to selected sections of this post: Navigation; R-bloggers; Task views; Rdocumentation.org; sos package; ??; apropos; ls; methods; getAnywhere; :::; find; args; grep; %in%; str; getwd; file.choose; Spyglass summary; browser; See also. Overview Figu...
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An experience of EARL
Coordinates: 2014 September 15-17 in the London borough of #rstats. 15th, evening I had just the right number of R bugs so that I could walk to the drinks and arrive fashionably late. On the way, I realized that I hadn’t been near the Tower of London since the first year I moved to London even though I live within walking distance. Once arri...
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