Posts Tagged ‘R’

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Turning Statistics Into Knowledge: Seminar Review and Notes

July 24th, 2009

I had the pleasure of attending the Seminar on Innovative Approaches to Turn Statistics into Knowledge, hosted by the US Census Bureau, the World Bank, and the OECD. While Robert Kosara, from UNC Charlotte, has a fairly thorough review (but not focusing on the technical aspects) of the seminar, and I would agree with most of his points (except for the presentation by David Spiegelhalter and Mike Pearson; their presentation was geared toward (and succeeded in) linking data with decision making), I didn’t read much about the technical side of things, so I thought I’d cover those areas here.

Here’s the low-down:

» Read more: Turning Statistics Into Knowledge: Seminar Review and Notes

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Posted in Data Visualization, Programming, Software, Tools, Website

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LOESS in Excel: Big deal?

June 30th, 2009

While I’m no statistician, I’ve enjoyed dabbling in R and appreciate its simplicity and power. Take the LOESS function, for example. It’s built in to R. Excel needs a plug-in. Wow. Gotta love R. Used to love Excel, then I grew up (just a little :)

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New R script: Plot Nike+ runs

June 5th, 2009

I’ve been playing around with R and Nike+ and thought I’d put the two together, so I wrote a little R script that pulls your public data from the Nike+ website and plot out the graphs. It’s a little rough around the edges (see below for a list of enhancements/fixes), but it generates plots. I like SlowGeek, but found their smoothing function a bit too “smooth” — it was shaving 1/2 mph from my run speeds. I wasn’t happy with that ;) Read more to get the source code, below.

Sample: Sample

For an example of what it might look like, you can see my plots.

» Read more: New R script: Plot Nike+ runs

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Posted in Programming, Running, Software, Tools, Website

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The Next Supreme Court Justice: Andrew Gelman’s take

May 12th, 2009

Andrew Gelman, at Columbia University, clearly enjoys his work. Anyone who publishes this must: “My quick take on the Souter replacement is that … Obama could nominate Pee Wee Herman to the Supreme Court and get him confirmed. But I’m no expert on this…” Very funny. I wonder what he’s like in person.

He posted a thorough and enlightening review of the possibilities for the next Supreme Court justice, based on current (and recently departed) judges: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2009/05/the_next_suprem.html. Take some time to scour through his write-up.  While you’re at it, treat yourself to the rest of his blog. It’s rich!

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Posted in Data Visualization

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How Google and Facebook are using R : Dataspora Blog

May 12th, 2009

I’m a little behind the times, but I just saw this posting of how Google and Facebook are using R, my favorite new tool: How Google and Facebook are using R : Dataspora Blog. From the CRAN network to the easy chart/graph construction, R makes data analysis dangerously easy. Maybe too easy??? I mean, all those formulae have to mean something, right? I just scratch the surface of R with my tinkering, but it is clearly a very potent tool for crunching lots of numbers. And who has more data to crunch than Google? I mean, with a database called “Big Table” who doubts that they’re the biggest brother on the block.

Anyway, I plan on using R more and more in the coming months. Maybe I’ll be able to hear more about how Google is using it, too.

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Posted in Data Visualization, Programming

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