Publications by andrew
Infovis vs. statgraphics: A clear example of their different goals
I recently came across a data visualization that perfectly demonstrates the difference between the “infovis” and “statgraphics” perspectives. Here’s the image (link from Tyler Cowen): That’s the infovis. The statgraphic version would simply be a dotplot, something like this: (I purposely used the default settings in R with only mino...
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NppToR 2.6.0 beta 2
http://sourceforge.net/projects/npptor/files/npptor%20installer/NppToR-2.6.0.beta2.exe/download I’ve released beta 2 of NppToR 2.6.0. Please take a look and report any problems. This improves the installer and the uninstaller as well as a few bugs that popped up from the transition to UNICODE. Related To leave a comment for the author, pl...
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Using a “pure infographic” to explore differences between information visualization and statistical graphics
Our discussion on data visualization continues. One one side are three statisticians–Antony Unwin, Kaiser Fung, and myself. We have been writing about the different goals served by information visualization and statistical graphics. On the other side are graphics experts (sorry for the imprecision, I don’t know exactly what these people do i...
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Data manipulations
In the last Utah R Users group meeting I gave a presentation on data manipulations on R, and today I found through the plyr mailing list two commands that I was previously unaware of that should definitely be made mention of. arrange I was very pleased to find arrange because it fills the nagging hole for sorting data frames. Calling arrange(d...
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Why it doesn’t make sense to chew people out for not reading the help page
Karl Broman writes: Barry Rowlingson gave an interesting talk at UseR 2011, “Why R-help must die!” He suggested the Q-and-A type sites Stack Overflow (on programming) and Cross Validated (on statistics), both part of Stack Exchange. I haven’t used R-help recently but I do occasionally send people there. Just to see what was going on there,...
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Web-friendly visualizations in R
Aleks points me to this new tool from Wojciech Gryc. Right now I save my graphs as pdfs or pngs and then upload them to put them on the web. I expect I’ll still be doing this for awhile—I like having full control of what my graphs look like—but Gryc’s default plots might be useful for lots of people making their analyses more accessible. ...
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Wickham R short course
Hadley writes: I [Hadley] am going to be teaching an R development master class in New York City on Dec 12-13. The basic idea of the class is to help you write better code, focused on the mantra of “do not repeat yourself”. In day one you will learn powerful new tools of abstraction, allowing you to solve a wider range of problems with fewer ...
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World record running times vs. distance
Julyan Arbel plots world record running times vs. distance (on the log-log scale): The line has a slope of 1.1. I think it would be clearer to plot speed vs. distance—then you’d get a slope of -0.1, and the numbers would be more directly interpretable. Indeed, this paper by Sandra Savaglio and Vincenzo Carbone (referred to in the comments o...
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Permanently Setting the CRAN repository
Setting the CRAN repository so that it does not ask every time you try to install a package is something that I think few people bother to do, but it is so simple and can save a fair bit of frustration when working. This is accomplished through a setting in one of the Rprofile files. There is the site file found at either /etc/R/Rprofile.s...
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CrossValidated: A place to post your statistics questions
Seth Rogers writes: I [Rogers] am a member of an online community of statisticians where I burn a great deal of time (and a recovering cog sci researcher). Our community website is a peer-reviewed Q and A spanning stats topics ranging from applications to mathematical theory. Our online community consists of mostly university faculty, grad studen...
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