Publications by prasoonsharma
World Bank data plots – Take 2
A few months ago, I created World Bank plots and compiled the images on Flickr to share it online. Recently I came across Mark’s post to create animated images in R and it inspired me to re-create my World Bank plots as animated images. With this technique I was able to group the plots in a category together as one animated image...
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Batting and Bowling performance in Ashes 2010 – 2011
English cricket is strong once again. And it is great to see that (after all they invented the gentleman’s game).In a sharp contrast to previous tours of Australia, England outplayed Australia on their home ground in the recently concluded Ashes 2010-11 series (see performance comparison of 2010-11 and 2006-07 series below).English wins in 201...
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EPL Fantasy Football: Best overall, home and away teams
I’ve refined the R code to pick the best fantasy soccer team by using more granular player performance data (available publicly). Here are the best overall, home and away teams. The constraints used are: 1) Number of goalkeepers = 12) Number of defenders = 43) Number of mid fielders = 34) Number of strikers = 35) Total team cost = 50 GBP6) M...
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Stata or R
Recently I came across a complex model written in Access with complex SQL queries all over the place. The engineer who was maintaining it and I did some analysis and agreed that the model was using SQL in an unnatural way (things SQL isn’t good at) – complex logic, formatting etc. We agreed to use SQL and a more powerful programming language...
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Stata or R – How to create dynamic variables in R?
As we dig deeper into Stata or R debate, a few questions have come up.Question 1: One of the things Stata does well is the way it constructs new variables (see example below). How to do this in R?We can rewrite it as-is using for loops in R, which is slow and not elegant. What’s the elegant way to write this in R? I haven’t used plyr yet�...
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Why learn R?
I’m introducing R to a few colleagues this week and want to share why learning a software like R is important… Here are a few articles that explain it well… Other reasons?Importance of data science– Couple years ago Google’s Chief Economist Hal Varian said that the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. Read the full art...
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Big data problems
I have big data problems.I need to analyze 100s of millions of rows of data and tried hard for 2 weeks to see if I can use R for this. My assessment so far from the experiments…1) R is best for data that fits a computer’s RAM (so get more RAM if you can).2) R can be used for datasets that don’t fit into RAM using Bigmemory and ff packages....
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Introducing R in the Enterprise
We’ve introduced R in the organization!It is running along with the heavy weights of statistical analysis like SAS, SPSS, Matlab. Here’s what we did and how we did it…HOW DID IT START?I started learning R last year and loved its simplicity and power. After using it primarily for personal projects, I came across a business problem in whic...
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Vehicle Routing Problem
This is a follow-up to a previous question on VRP. I investigated R libraries and several other options to solve VRP and decided to build a custom desktop application using open source libraries from COIN-OR. Screenshots attached below.Leave a comment if you’re interested. I will contact you directly.Team: Prasoon, Khaled, James Related To le...
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10 reasons why you should learn R
10. Can’t crack that hard Sudoku problem?? Use R!9. Want to pick a skill that will give you an early adopter advantage?? Learn R! It is the leading open source statistical and data analysis programming language, and is heating up! 8. Need to run statistical calculations in your software application?? Deploy R! It integrates with many program...
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