Publications by richierocks
useR2011 Easy interactive ggplots talk
I’m talking tomorrow at useR! on making ggplots interactive with the gWidgets GUI framework. For those of you at useR, here is the code and data, so you can play along on your laptops. For everyone else, I’ll make the slides available in the next few days so you can see what you missed. Note that for confidentiality reasons, I’ve added s...
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useR2011 highlights
useR has been exhilarating and exhausting. Now it’s finished, I wanted to share my highlights. 10. My inner twelve year old schoolgirl swooning and fainting with excitement every time I chatted with a member of R-core. 9. Patrick Burns declaring that his company consists of himself and his two cats. And that one of the cats keeps changing the...
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More useless statistics
Over at the ExploringDataBlog, Ron Pearson just wrote a post about the cases when means are useless. In fact, it’s possible to calculate a whole load of stats on your data and still not really understand it. The canonical dataset for demonstrating this (spoiler alert: if you are doing an intro to stats course, you will see this example soon) ...
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Anonymising data
There are only three known jokes about statistics in the whole universe, so to complete the trilogy (see here and here for the other two), listen up: Three statisticians are on a train journey to a conference, and they get chatting to three epidemiologists who are also going to the same place. The epidemiologists are complaining about the ridicu...
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Nomograms everywhere!
At useR!, Jonty Rougier talked about nomograms, a once popular visualisation that has fallen by the wayside with the rise of computers. I’d seen a few before, but hadn’t understood how they worked or why you’d want to use them. Anyway, since that talk I’ve been digging around in biology books from the 60s and 70s, and it seems they are ...
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Interactive graphics for data analysis
I got a copy of Martin Theus and Simon Urbanek’s Interactive Graphics for Data Analysis a couple of years ago, whence it’s been sat on my bookshelf. Since I’ve recently become a self-proclaimed expert on interactive graphics I thought it was about time I read the thing. Which is exactly what I did last weekend at the Leeds Festival (in be...
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A quick primer on split-apply-combine problems
I’ve just answered my hundred billionth question on Stack Overflow that goes something like I want to calculate some statistic for lots of different groups. Although these questions provide a steady stream of easy points, its such a common and basic data analysis concept that I thought it would be useful to have a document to refer people to....
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Adding metadata to variables
There are only really two ways to preserve your statistical analyses. You either save the variables that you create, or you save the code that you used to create them. In general the latter is much preferred because at some point you’ll realise that your model was wrong, or your dataset has changed, and you need to re-run your analysis. If yo...
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Exploring the functions in a package
Sometimes it can be useful to list all the functions inside a package. This is done in the same way that you would list variables in your workspace. That is, using ls. The syntax is ls(pos = "package:packagename"), which is easy enough if you can remember it. Unfortunately, I never can, and have to type search() first to see what the format o...
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R hits 10000 questions on stackoverflow
A milestone, though not that exciting as questions go. Still, if you haven’t yet joined the cult of Stack Exchange, take a look here. Tagged: r, stackoverflow Related To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: 4D Pie Charts » R. R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutori...
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