Archive for the Rstats Tag

More Dabblings With Local Sentencing Data

In Accessing and Visualising Sentencing Data for Local Courts I posted a couple of quick ways in to playing with Ministry of Justice sentencing data for the period July 2010-June 2011 at the local court level. At the end of the post, I wondered about how to wrangle the data in R so that I [...]

Accessing and Visualising Sentencing Data for Local Courts

A recent provisional data release from the Ministry of Justice contains sentencing data from English(?) courts, at the offence level, for the period July 2010-June 2011: “Published for the first time every sentence handed down at each court in the country between July 2010 and June 2011, along with the age and ethnicity of each [...]

Getting Started With Twitter Analysis in R

Earlier today, I saw a post vis the aggregating R-Bloggers service a post on Using Text Mining to Find Out What @RDataMining Tweets are About. The post provides a walktrhough of how to grab tweets into an R session using the twitteR library, and then do some text mining on it. I’ve been meaning to [...]

Data Referenced Journalism and the Media – Still a Long Way to Go Yet?

Reading our local weekly press this evening (the Isle of Wight County Press), I noticed a page 5 headline declaring “Alarm over death rates at St Mary’s”, St Mary’s being the local general hospital. It seems a Department of Health report on hospital mortality rates came out earlier this week, and the Island’s hospital, it [...]

How Might Data Journalists Show Their Working? Sweave

If part of the role of data journalism is to make transparent the justification behind claims that are, or aren’t, backed up by data, there’s good reason to suppose that the journalists should be able to back up their own data-based claims with evidence about how they made use of the data. Posting links to [...]

Power Tools for Aspiring Data Journalists: Funnel Plots in R

Picking up on Paul Bradshaw’s post A quick exercise for aspiring data journalists which hints at how you can use Google Spreadsheets to grab – and explore – a mortality dataset highlighted by Ben Goldacre in DIY statistical analysis: experience the thrill of touching real data, I thought I’d describe a quick way of analysing [...]

Using Google Spreadsheets as a Database Source for R

I couldn’t contain myself (other more pressing things to do, but…), so I just took a quick time out and a coffee to put together a quick and dirty R function that will let me run queries over Google spreadsheet data sources and essentially treat them as database tables (e.g. Using Google Spreadsheets as a [...]

Merging Two Different Datasets Containing a Common Column With R and R-Studio

Another way for the database challenged (such as myself!) for merging two datasets that share at least one common column… This recipe using the cross-platform stats analysis package, R. I use R via the R-Studio client, which provides an IDE wrapper around the R environment. So for example, here’s how to merge a couple of [...]