dplyrThe R package dplyr, written by Hadley Wickham is only a few months old but has already become an important part of our data analysis/manipulation workflow, replacing functions that we have used for years. There are several reasons why dplyr is such a valuable tool but most important from my perspective are the following: Speed. […]
Continue reading →We use PostgreSQL/PostGIS to manage a lot of our tabular and geographic data from the US Census. In terms of workflow we will either download a shapefile manually from ftp://ftp.census.gov/geo/tiger/ or, if we’re dealing with more than one file (block groups or blocks for example), we will do this from within R (using the download.file() […]
Continue reading →ggmap PackageOne of the great pieces of the new ggmap package is the geocoding functionality. Other R functions can be used to geocode but they fail to provide detailed output like geocode accuracy which is often critical. You need to know if the lat/long in the output refers to a rooftop location or a city center, […]
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