Publications by civilstat
Making R graphics legible in presentation slides
I only visited a few JSM sessions today, as I’ve been focused on preparing for my own talk tomorrow morning. However, I went to several talks in a row which all had a common problem that made me cringe: graphics where the fonts (titles, axes, labels) are too small to read. You used R's default settings when putting this graph in your slides? To...
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Commandeering a map from PDF or EPS, using Inkscape and R
I love Nathan Yau’s tutorial on making choropleths from a SVG file. However, if you don’t have a SVG handy already and instead you want to repurpose a map from another vector format such as PDF or EPS, there are a few extra steps that can be done in the free tool Inkscape. And while I’m at it, how could I turn down the opportunity to replic...
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Carl Morris Symposium on Large-Scale Data Inference (2/3)
Continuing the summary of last week’s symposium on statistics and data visualization (see part 1 and part 3)… Here I describe Dianne Cook’s discussion of visual inference, and Rob Kass’ talk on statistics in cognitive neuroscience. [Edit: I’ve added a few more related links throughout the post.] “It’s impressive that statisticians...
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Basics of JavaScript and D3 for R Users
Hadley Wickham, creator of the ggplot2 R package, has been learning JavaScript and its D3 library for the next iteration of ggplot2 (tentatively titled r2d3?)… so I suspect it’s only a matter of time before he pulls the rest of the R community along. Below are a few things that weren’t obvious when I first tried reading JavaScript code and...
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Javascript and D3 for R users, part 2: running off the R server instead of Python
Thank you all for the positive responses to Basics of JavaScript and D3 for R Users! Quick update: last time we had to dabble in a tiny bit of Python to start a local server, in order to actually run JavaScript and D3 examples on our home computer… However, commenter Shankar had the great idea of using the R server instead. He provided some ex...
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Animated map of 2012 US election campaigning, with R and ffmpeg
(Video link here, in case the embedded player doesn’t work for you.) Idea: see if I can mimic the idea behind Ben Schmidt’s lovely video of ocean shipping routes, and apply it to another dataset. But which? “Hmm… what’s another interesting dataset about some competitors traveling around a mostly-fixed area at the same time?… Hey frien...
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DC R Meetup: “Analyze US Government Survey Data with R”
I really enjoyed tonight’s DC R Meetup, presented by the prolific Anthony Damico. [Edit: adding link to the full video of Anthony’s talk; review is below.] I’ve met Anthony before to discuss whether the Census Bureau could either… publish R-readable input statements for flat file public datasets (instead of only the SAS input statements...
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audiolyzR: Data sonification with R
In his talk “Give Your Data A Listen” at last summer’s useR! 2012 conference, Eric Stone presented joint work with Jesse Garrison on audiolyzR, an R package for “data sonification.” I thought this was a nifty and well-executed idea. Since I haven’t seen Eric and Jesse post any demos online yet, I’d like to share a summary and vi...
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After 1st semester of Statistics PhD program
Have you ever wondered whether the first semester of a PhD is really all that busy? My complete lack of posts last fall should prove it Some thoughts on the Fall term, now that Spring is well under way: The first-year PhD courses in Statistics and in Machine Learning have rather different approaches. Statistics professor: Just assume we can co...
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Reproducible research, training wheels, and knitr
Last week I gave a short talk at CMU’s statistical computing seminar, Stat Bytes. I summarized why reproducible research (RR) and literate programming are worthwhile, not just for serious research but also for homework reports or statistical blog posts. I demonstrated how to get started with a range of RR document formats in R: from the “trai...
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