Publications by Robert
Two handy documents for making good UK maps
Everybody loves a good map. Even if you don’t have any reason to make one, your boss will love it when you do, so check this out and get yourself a pay rise (possibly). First, this set of diagrams via ONS Geographies on Twitter, showing how the different terminologies of UK administrative geography overlap and nest. It looks horrible, like it w...
1189 sym 6 img
Save your simulation study seeds
Here in the Northern hemisphere, gardeners are gathering seeds from their prize-winning vegetables are storing them away for next year’s crop. Today at the 20th London Stata Users’ Group meeting, I learnt a similar trick. It’s strange I never thought of it before; regular readers will know how keen I am on simulation studies and techniques....
1716 sym R (789 sym/2 pcs) 4 img
Transparent hurricane paths in R
Arthur Charpentier has written a really nice blog post about obtaining hurricane tracks and plotting them. He then goes on to do other clever Markov process models, but as a dataviz guy who knows almost nothing about meteorology, I want to suggest just a small improvement to the maps. Almost every graphic with a lot of data benefits from transpa...
1401 sym 8 img
Slice bivariate densities, or the Joy Division “waterfall plot”
This has been on my to-do list for a long old time. Lining up slices through a bivariate density seems a much more intuitive way of depicting it than contour plots or some ghastly rotating 3-D thing (urgh). Of course, there is the danger of features being hidden, but you know I’m a semi-transparency nut, so it’s no surprise I think that’s t...
950 sym R (1403 sym/1 pcs) 6 img
Roman dataviz and inference in complex systems
I’m in Rome at the International Workshop on Computational Economics and Econometrics. I gave a seminar on Monday on the ever-popular subject of data visualization. Slides are here. In a few minutes, I’ll be speaking on Inference in Complex Systems, a topic of some interest from practical research experience my colleague Rick Hood and I have ...
1153 sym 4 img
St Swithun’s Day simulator
I got a bit bored (sorry Mike), and wrote this. I didn’t take long (I tell you that not so much to cover my backside as to celebrate the majesty of R). First, I estimated probabilities of a day being rainy if the previous was dry, and of it being rainy if the previous day was rainy. I couldn’t be bothered with any thinking, so I used ABC, whi...
1296 sym R (1521 sym/1 pcs) 4 img
Showing a distribution over time: how many summary stats?
I saw this nice graph today on Twitter, by Thomas Forth: but the more I looked at it, the more I felt it was hard to understand the changes over time across the income distribution from the Gini coefficient and the median. People started asking online for other percentiles, so I thought I would smooth each of them from the source data and plot t...
2639 sym 8 img
Everything you need to make R Commander locally (packages, dependencies, zip files)
I’ve been installing R Commander on laptops for our students to use in tutorials. It’s tedious to put each one online with my login, download it all, then disable the internet (so they don’t send lewd e-mails to the vice-chancellor from my account, although I could always plead that I had misunderstood the meaning of his job title). I event...
2173 sym 4 img
So you want to be a Data Science superstar
Big house? Five cars? There’s no one universal way to do it, but get a coffee and read on through this bumper post to find your own way with the advice of real experts. Last summer, Mrs G and I were in that ridiculously long line for the cablecar in San Francisco, like predictable British tourists, and got talking to the guys next to us. One of...
17341 sym 4 img
Dataviz of the week: 8/3/17
Corinne Riddell posted this on Twitter. It’s one version of multiple time series that she tried out, one for each USA state. It’s not the finished article, but is really nice for its combination of that recognisable shape (I suppose if your country has a dull shape like Portugal — no offence — then readers won’t immediately recognise th...
1436 sym 6 img