Split strings based on a character in the string

December 11th, 2012

R has various facilities for string manipulation including the strsplit function to divide a string into substrings based on matching to another string. Read the rest of this entry »

LaTeX Beamer Posters

November 14th, 2012

The power of the beamer class for LaTeX has been combined with the a0poster class to produce a method for more easily creating posters.

Graph Types: Pie Charts

October 13th, 2012

The pie chart is a frequently seen graph that uses area to compare percentages for a set of categories. Although this type of graph is based on comparing single metric for each category the display is two dimensional but sometimes even appears in three dimensions. Read the rest of this entry »

Data from the ONS

September 15th, 2012

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) in the UK makes various data sets publicly available on their website. This includes a number of time series that could be useful for learning about different statistical models for time series data.

Linear Algebra Video Tutorials

August 19th, 2012

The following website has some interesting introductory course videos on linear algebra from Gilbert Strang at MIT.

R Graphical Manual

July 5th, 2012

The R Graphical Manual is worth checking out for ideas about graphing data.

Graph Design Principles

June 25th, 2012

There are a set of basic principles that hold true for the design of many graphs and various authors have their own preferences. One author who is prominent due to his good work in the area of data visualisation and presentation of evidence to support decision making is Edward Tufte. Read the rest of this entry »

Logistic Regression and Bias Reduction

May 22nd, 2012

David Firth published a paper in 1993 on maximum likelihood estimation and the reduction of bias when using this approach. The research in this area appears to provide benefit for logistic regression in small data sets where there is complete of quasi separation. This approach has been implemented for Generalized Linear Models in the brglm package. Read the rest of this entry »

Theme Elements in ggplot2

May 3rd, 2012

This website provides a simple summary of the theme elements that can be set within ggplot2. There should be sufficient information here to change the default settings for graphs within the ggplot2 package.

Melt

April 5th, 2012

There are many situations where data is presented in a format that is not ready to dive straight to exploratory data analysis or to use a desired statistical method. The reshape2 package for R provides useful functionality to avoid having to hack data around in a spreadsheet prior to import into R. Read the rest of this entry »