I’ve recently taken delivery of a Raspberry Pi mini computer. For anyone who doesn’t know, this is a low cost, low power machine, costing around 20 GBP (25 USD) and consuming around 2.5 Watts of power (it is powered by micro-USB). This amazing little device can run linux very adequately, and so naturally I’ve been […]
This post shows how to create a timeline graph by using ggplot2. Let’s start by loading the ggplot2 library. Next let’s create a dataset which we will use to feed the graph. In the last column (y), I create random positive values for the first three rows (which will be Read more »The post Timeline graph with ggplot2 appeared first on FishyOperations.
Last week, scientists presented evidence for a "Higgs-like" particle, and this got science reporters really excited. Unfortunately, they got really excited about understanding the particle, but not the interpretation of the evidence for the particle.&#...
Reader Sushil B. offers this chart from Business Week on hedge fund returns. (link) Unmoored bubbles, slanted text, positive and negative returns undifferentiated, bubble within bubble, paired data scattered apart, and it's not even that attractive. Here is a Bumps-chart...
Thomas Basbøll writes: [Advertising executive] Russell Davies wrote a blog post called “The Tyranny of the Big Idea”. His five-point procedure begins: Start doing stuff. Start executing things which seem right. Do it quickly and do it often. Don’t cling onto anything, good or bad. Don’t repeat much. Take what was good and do it [...]
I saw this plot in the supplement of a recent paper comparing microarray results to RNA-seq results. Nothing earth-shattering in the paper - you've probably seen a similar comparison many times before - but I liked how they solved the overplotting...
I thank Dr. Vladimir Cherkassky for taking up my general invitation to comment. I don’t have much to add to my original post[i], except to make two corrections at the end of this post. I invite readers’ comments. As I could not participate in the discussion session on Sunday, I would like to address several [...]
As an illustration of how straight forward it is in JAGS/BUGS to fit non-linear trends to data, I estimated the parameters of a sinusoid-plus-linear trend when fit to average daily temperatures. The temperatures are for Madison, Wisconsin, in honor of ...
Ring Lardner, Jr.: [In 1936] I was already settled in Southern California, and it may have been that first exercise of the franchise that triggered the FBI surveillance of me that would last for decades. I had assumed, of course, that I was enjoying the vaunted American privilege of the secret ballot. On a wall [...]
Over the last few days, I've written a couple of posts (here, here) about creating coefficient plots. I like them way better than tables, but I don't really see a need for them.…
I guess we should not call Higgs Boson the “God Particle” any longer. Plenty of news have reported on this findings on July 4th, 2012. If you haven’t watched the original webcast announcement posted at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, you got to spend some time on it. A shorter version of the video summarizes the [...]
The Problem In the United States, health care costs have been going up for a number of years, even when adjusted for inflation. Not unlike a runaway freight train, this rampant inflation cannot continue indefinitely without crashing. ...
A timeline is a perfect tool for visualising complex information … and is sometimes quite complex itself. This example from evolutionoftheweb gives both. And it shows interesting details like the evolution of Flash and SVG over time. Flash SVG...
In an article catchily entitled, “I got more data, my model is more refined, but my estimator is getting worse! Am I just dumb?”, Meng and Xie write: Possibly, but more likely you are merely a victim of conventional wisdom. More data or better models by no means guarantee better estimators (e.g., with a smaller [...]
David Hogg on responsible data analysis: The key idea is that the result of responsible data analysis is not an answer but a distribution over answers. Data are inherently noisy and incomplete; they never answer your question precisely. So no…Read more ›
My serious stats book is officially published (in the UK at least). The US release date is next month (August 7th). I'm not sure why the release is later (possibly extra shipping time for the books). The earlier European release date is I suppose compe...
Weave (BETA 1.0) is a new web-based visualization platform designed to enable visualization of any available data by anyone for any purpose. Weave is an application development platform supporting multiple levels of user proficiency – novice to advan...
I've been working on a new book about Simulating Data with SAS. In researching the chapter on simulation of multivariate data, I've noticed that the probability density function (PDF) of multivariate distributions is often specified in a matrix form. Consequently, the multivariate density can usually be computed by using the [...]
The comment box was too small for my reply to Sober on falsification, so I will post it here: I want to understand better Sober’s position on falsification. A pervasive idea to which many still subscribe, myself included, is that the heart of what makes inquiry scientific is the critical attitude: that if a claim [...]
Jorge Cham, the cartoonist behind the Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD Comics) has illustrated a very educational interview with Daniel Whiteson, Assistant Professor in Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine at CERN. The resulting...
Social media advertising firm DBB, in collaboration with PKP (Polish State Railways), developed a public, electronic timetable that communicates the departure time, destination, platform and waiting time to commuters at Warsaw Central Station. Howev...
When we backtest a strategy on a portfolio, it is a simple analysis of a single period in time. There are ways to “stress test” a strategy such as monte carlo, random portfolios, or shuffling the returns in a random order. I could never really wrap my head around monte carlo and shuffling the returns … Continue reading →
