Publications by HighlandR
Getting started with network plots
Network plots can be hit or miss. However, the visNetwork package greatly simplifies the process of producing useful, interactive network plots. – I’ve long been hoping for a reason to have to devote time to learning how to produce network plots. In my world, where bar and line charts reign supreme (with heatmaps and waffle charts th...
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Defending the indefensible
I opened Twitter on Saturday night to see indignant tweets everywhere, most of which seemed to be directed towards a plot (or, more accurately, a series of plots) that were shown as part of the UK Government Coronavirus briefing on Saturday evening. ‘Excel’ was actually trending, and you’re probably thinking, ‘Hold on, we’ve done this a...
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NHS-R Community Conference 2020
The 3rd NHS-R Community Conference wrapped up a week ago last Friday, and was a hugely enjoyable event. There was a pre-conference training week, during which I was able to attend Syliva Canelon’s excellent xaringan workshops. They were fantastic. Then the second week was the main conference week, consisting of plenary talks in the morning, a...
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collapse might rock your world
The NHS-R Community site prompted this post, specifically a question to the help-with-r channel on Slack. Someone asked about obtaining unique values in a 60M row / 6 column dataset. Naturally, data.table came up, and a few of us made suggestions for improvement, but we didn’t seem to be hitting on a magic solution. Without being able to get m...
2909 sym R (1687 sym/9 pcs)
demystifying the coalesce function
What does coalesce mean? In the English language, it is generally used to convey a coming together, or creating one whole body, mass or system. How does that help us when working with data? We spend a lot of time cleaning our data, surely the last thing we want to do is lump it all together? In dplyr, coalesce takes after SQL’s coalesce. Any i...
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Demystifying the coalesce function
Why you should know about it – What does coalesce mean? In the English language, it is generally used to convey a coming together, or creating one whole body, mass or system. How does that help us when working with data? We spend a lot of time cleaning our data, surely the last thing we want to do is lump it all together? In dplyr, co...
2979 sym R (2051 sym/17 pcs)
PreppinData – accepting the challenge with R and PowerBI
I had the good fortune of stumbling across a tweet by the organisers of PreppinData This is a bit like Tidy Tuesday, except it’s focussed more on data preparation than data visualisation. Ostensibly, it’s for people to get to grips with Tableau’s data preparation tool, but the organisers are open to other solutions using other tools. Preppi...
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PreppinData – accepting the challenge with R and PowerBI
I had the good fortune of stumbling across a tweet by the organisers of PreppinData This is a bit like Tidy Tuesday, except it’s focussed more on data preparation than data visualisation. Ostensibly, it’s for people to get to grips with Tableau’s data preparation tool, but the organisers are open to other solutions using other tools. Preppi...
5132 sym R (959 sym/6 pcs) 4 img
Some data.table tips
I’ve been using data.table quite a lot in my spare time, and I want to make a few notes of some things I’ve learned along the way. I would say I’m no longer a beginner, not yet an expert, but getting there.. As noted in a previous post, I’ve been doing the PreppinData challenges, or at least I was – things have fallen a bit by the waysi...
3875 sym R (3145 sym/8 pcs)
Some data.table tips
I’ve been using data.table quite a lot in my spare time, and I want to make a few notes of some things I’ve learned along the way. I would say I’m no longer a beginner, not yet an expert, but getting there.. As noted in a previous post, I’ve been doing the PreppinData challenges, or at least I was – things have fallen a bit by the waysi...
4011 sym R (3145 sym/8 pcs)