Building R packages is not particular hard, but it can be a bit of a daunting endeavour at the beginning, particularly if you are more of a statistician than a computer scientist or programmer. Some concepts may appear foreign or like red tape, yet m...
Following on from last week's post, here are my slides on using googleVis on shiny from the Advanced R workshop at Lancaster University, 21 May 2013. googleVis on shiny Again, I wrote my slides in RMarkdown and I used slidify to create the HTML...
Last week I was invited to give an introduction to googleVis at Lancaster University. This time I decided to use the R package slidify for my talk. Slidify, like knitr, is built on Markdown and makes it very easy to create beautiful HTML5 presentations...
It occurred to us recently that we don’t have any articles about Bayesian approaches to statistics here. I’m not going to get into the “Bayesian versus Frequentist” war; in my opinion, which style of approach to use is less about philosophy, and more about figuring out the best way to answer a question. Once you [...] Related posts: Statistics to English Translation, Part 2a: ’Significant’ Doesn’t Always Mean ’Important’ Worry…
Often I like to reduce the alpha value (level of transparency) of colours to identify patterns of over-plotting when displaying lots of data points with R. So, here is a tiny function that allows me to add an alpha value to a given vector of colours, ...
Setting axis options in googleVis charts can be a bit tricky. Here I present two examples where I set several options to customise the layout of a line and combo chart with two axes. The parameters have to be set in line with the Google Chart Tools A...
In data science work you often run into cryptic sentences like the following: Age adjusted death rates per 10,000 person years across incremental thirds of muscular strength were 38.9, 25.9, and 26.6 for all causes; 12.1, 7.6, and 6.6 for cardiovascular disease; and 6.1, 4.9, and 4.2 for cancer (all P < 0.01 for linear [...] Related posts: Level fit summaries can be tricky in R How to test XCOM…
I frequently get asked to recommend workshops or online learning resources for bioinformatics, genomics, statistics, and programming. I compiled a list of both online learning resources and in-person workshops (preferentially highlighting those where w...
A couple of weeks ago I, with the help of others here at UVA, organized a Software Carpentry bootcamp, instructed by Steve Crouch, Carlos Anderson, and Ben Morris. The day before the course started, Charlottesville was racked by nearly a foot of s...
A friend of mine asked me the other day how she could use the function optim in R to fit data. Of course there are functions for fitting data in R and I wrote about this earlier. However, she wanted to understand how to do this from scratch using opti...
