Win-Vector Blog

The important criterion for a graph is not simply how fast we can see a result; rather it is whether through the use of the graph we can see something that would have been harder to see otherwise or that could not have been seen at all.

– William Cleveland, The Elements of Graphing Data, Chapter 2

In this article, I will discuss some graphs that I find extremely useful in my day-to-day work as a data scientist. While all of them are helpful (to me) for statistical visualization during the analysis process, not all of them will necessarily be useful for presentation of final results, especially to non-technical audiences.

I tend to follow Cleveland’s philosophy, quoted above; these graphs show me — and hopefully you — aspects of data and models that I might not otherwise see. Some of them, however, are non-standard, and tend to require explanation. My purpose here is to share with our readers some ideas for graphical analysis that are either useful to you directly, or will give you some ideas of your own.

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We have been consistently impressed by and enjoyed the wealth of R wisdom available on the R-bloggers aggregation site.

Therefore Win-Vector LLC is granting the right to reformat and redistribute (with attribution and link) our blog‘s R content in the R-bloggers site and feeds.

We hope to see our R content shared through this network.

Programmers should definitely know how to use R. I don’t mean they should switch from their current language to R, but they should think of R as a handy tool during development. Read more…

One of the recurring frustrations in data analytics is that your data is never in the right shape. Worst case: you are not aware of this and every step you attempt is more expensive, less reliable and less informative than you would want. Best case: you notice this and have the tools to reshape your data.

There is no final “right shape.” In fact even your data is never right. You will always be called to re-do your analysis (new variables, new data, corrections) so you should always understand you are on your “penultimate analysis” (always one more to come). This is why we insist on using general methods and scripted techniques, as these methods are much much easier to reliably reapply on new data than GUI/WYSWYG techniques.

In this article we will work a small example and call out some R tools that make reshaping your data much easier. The idea is to think in terms of “relational algebra” (like SQL) and transform your data towards your tools (and not to attempt to adapt your tools towards the data in an ad-hoc manner). Read more…

This is a tutorial on how to try out a new package in R. The summary is: expect errors, search out errors and don’t start with the built in examples or real data.

Suppose you want to try out a novel statistical technique? A good fraction of the time R is your best bet for a first trial. Take as an example general additive models (“Generalized Additive Models,” Trevor J Hastie, Robert Tibshirani, Statistical Science (1986) vol. 1 (3) pp. 297-318); R has a package named “gam” written by Trevor Hastie himself. But, like most R packages, trying the package from the supplied documentation brings in unfamiliar data and concerns. It is best to start small and quickly test if the package itself is suitable to your needs. We give a quick outline of how to learn such a package and quickly find out if the package is for you.

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One of the current best tools in the machine learning toolbox is the 1930s statistical technique called logistic regression. We explain how to add professional quality logistic regression to your analytic repertoire and describe a bit beyond that. Read more…

Having worked with Unix (BSD, HPUX, IRIX, Linux and OSX), Windows (NT4, 2000, XP, Vista and 7) for quite a while I have seen a lot of different software tools. I would like to quickly exhibit my “must have” list. These are the packages that I find to be the single “must have offerings” in a number of categories. I have avoided some categories (such as editors, email programs, programing language, IDEs, photo editors, backup solutions, databases, database tools and web tools) where I have no feeling of having seen a single absolute best offering.

The spirit of the list is to pick items such that: if you disagree with an item in this list then either you are wrong or you know something I would really like to hear about.

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Readers returning to our blog will know that Win-Vector LLC is fairly “pro-R.” You can take that to mean “in favor or R” or “professionally using R” (both statements are true). Some days we really don’t feel that way. Read more…

IowaHawk has a excellent article attempting to reproduce the infamous CRU climate graph using OpenOffice: Fables of the Reconstruction. We thought we would show how to produced similarly bad results using R.
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This article is quick concrete example of how to use the techniques from Survive R to lower the steepness of The R Project for Statistical Computing‘s learning curve (so an apology to all readers who are not interested in R). What follows is for people who already use R and want to achieve more control of the software. Read more…