Publications by Robert

Multidimensional scaling of REM album covers: FlagSpace revisited

11.12.2012

By way of following up on an old in-joke, and doing something constructive because I couldn’t get to sleep, I thought I would revisit the Flag Space plot that I blogged about a while back and learn how to do it. The details are here at R-bloggers and the code is here at Github. It is surprisingly simple. I actually only had 15 images (REM albu...

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Survival of the sweetest

12.12.2012

On receiving an advent calendar from one of our course directors, I suggested we could track each other’s chocolate consumption in a survival analysis and establish who was eating significantly more chocs. Strangely, everybody refused to take part, so I am n=1. Looking forward to being able to highlight some “shocks” on the graph. So far, s...

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Convert IP addresses to geolocation, latitude and longitude etc etc

29.05.2013

Whoa! Now this is cool. It turns out there is a database at freegeoip.net which you can query for the location of a particular IP address. And as it has a neat little API for batches of IPs, you can get R to fetch them en masse. That’s exactly what Heuristic Andrew has just done with a function that uses the rjson package to pull down data from...

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R2leaflet (v0.1) – make interactive online maps from R

11.06.2013

I have been working on a simple R function to take latitude and longitude of points of interest, and text for pop-up labels, and produce an interactive online map. Interactive graphics are incredibly useful in getting people interested in your work and communicating your data effectively, but very few statisticians / data analysts have the skills...

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Easy pictograms using R

26.07.2013

I have been amazed for a while that there is no major stats software offering pictograms. You know the sort of classic infographic I mean: Isotype’s classic design Well, I have been working on an R function to help with this. It’s at Github here and below. Here’s an example: man<-readPNG("man.png") pictogram(icon=man, n=c(12,35,52), group...

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LondonR lightning talk: Audiblization / sonification of data

30.07.2013

It looks like the next LondonR meeting on 10 September 2013 will involve a series of 5 minute lightning talks rather than a few half hour slots. I have proposed “Audiblization / sonification of data: what are people doing and is R a good launchpad for it?” Wot no subwoofer? Image courtesy of Matthew Grover. This is at such an embryonic stage ...

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R tips for moderately large data

16.09.2013

Some useful tips recently featured on r-bloggers and originally posted at Mollie’s Research Blog are worth reading. I say moderately large because I don’t really believe there is such a thing as big data (and it looks like Mollie doesn’t either, judging by the judicious use of the word ‘large’), but there are special computational probl...

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Software inter-operability meeting in London

08.11.2013

On the afternoon of 14 November, the RSS is hosting a joint meeting with the International Biometric Society at Errol Street. The topic is inter-operability, as in software packages talking to each other to make your life easier. This is a big deal, not some nerdish tweak. One of the speakers has summed it up so nicely in their abstract I shall ...

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Simulation (is where it’s happening)

18.11.2013

Jim Silverton wrote to the Allstat mailing list recently: “Hi, Anyone up for a challenge? Suppose we have [4] random variables that are random points on the surface of a sphere. What is the probability that the tetrahedron made by joining these points, contain the origin? I tried over and over – no idea.” This is really a classic probabili...

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CSI Stats: looking for traces of data fraud in R

06.12.2013

Recently, I was looking at some published research, and I became concerned that it looked strange. Firstly, it had results wildly different to other similar studies, and more exciting / publishable ones. So, I was looking through the original paper to try and work out what was going on. Something caught my eye in a table of means and standard dev...

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