A rough guide to some of the R-related books we keep close to our desks at all times. Several great references to statistics in R and some favorites related to data visualization. Statistical Methods for Environmental Epidemiology with R: This is a great book if you do time series modeling of health data. Roger and […]
Continue reading →Updated December 8, 2014 Introduction: Animate a path with D3 Viewing location data that varies through time on a static map is fun, but viewing it on an animated map is a lot more fun. Recently, online map lovers were excited by Chris Whong’s Day in the Life of a NYC Taxi map in which […]
Continue reading →I have learned a lot by reading Chris Whong‘s techblog about how he created the fun app NYC Taxis: A Day in the Life. One particularly interesting tidbit he described was how to extract the points and polylines from the JSON output of Google directions. He does a nice job of describing the details and […]
Continue reading →mgcv (with a little style)We use the R library mgcv for modeling environmental data with generalized additive models (GAMs). It's a great library loaded with functionality but we often find that the default diagnostic plots are uninspiring. The partial residual plots, in particular, are functional but not pretty and the residuals are almost invisible. This post would be much […]
Continue reading →Several months ago MapBox added a blog post to their site discussing vector tiles. As part of the post they had some fun examples including one based on comic books and one based on pirate treasure maps (created by AJ Ashton). Here are the thumbnails from that page. For other nice examples see the gallery. […]
Continue reading →As readers likely know putting your data online as interactive visualizations can be a lot of work. We like to use D3, Highcharts and the Google visualization API but all of these tools require some serious programming. When you’re building a website with custom data visualization the effort might make sense, but when you have […]
Continue reading →The jQuery Before/After plugin is a great interactive tool to explore changes through time. This plugin has been used to great effect by the New York Times to show changes in Japan before and after the tsunami that destroyed the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant. In most examples of the plugin, though, the maps are static […]
Continue reading →anti_join to find unmatched recordsIf you browse through our technical blog posts you’ll see quite a few devoted to the data analysis functionality in the R packge dplyr. This is due to the fact that we are constantly finding fun new functions to play with. We wanted to devote this small post to an unexpectedly useful function called anti_join. […]
Continue reading →The qgis2leaf plugin for QGIS makes it incredibly easy to create a basic, fully-functional Leaflet.js map using QGIS with no HTML/JavaScript/CSS programming. The plugin even allows you to use a variety of interesting basemaps including Stamen Watercolor (see our post on the watercolor map). To create a Leaflet map using the plugin follow these simple […]
Continue reading →ggplot2 cheatsheetEven the most experienced R users need help creating elegant graphics. The ggplot2 library is a phenomenal tool for creating graphics in R but even after many years of near-daily use we still need to refer to our Cheat Sheet. Up until now, we’ve kept these key tidbits on a local PDF. But for our […]
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