Category Archives: analysis

Uber Taxi Bar Chart Fail

I thought I would share something I found in an advertisement/marketing email from Uber Taxi.  See anything amiss about the bar charts? Let's hope Uber doesn't charge rates like they scale their bar charts.  Could be bad for business.

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The Hobbies of the Scripps 2014 Spelling Bee Contestants

I downloaded text data from  http://public.spellingbee.com/public/results/2014/round_results  and performed some text mining on the contestant interviews and came up with some interesting results.  The hobby with the highest round average was Volunteering followed by Chess and Movies.  I filtered for hobbies … Continue reading

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On the Seasonality of Hoppy Beers

Hops are what give beer a bitter, tangy, citrusy, earthy, fruity, floral, herbal, woody, piney, and/or a spicy aromas and flavors. Originally they were used as a preservative because of their natural antimicrobial powers, now they are a defining characteristic … Continue reading

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A Small Trick for Big Data in R

The other day I was writing a prediction script in R for a very large data set. I was data prepping and needed to create a logical vector from a numeric vector. I didn't want to spend the time loading … Continue reading

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Webscraping in R: Part 1

It's hard to believe, but webscraping in R can be done really easily. With no fancy packages either. I recently ran into the need to scrape weather information from the web. After writing the program, I realized this specific task … Continue reading

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Using DPLYR in R: A Quicker, Easier Way to Work with Data

As I promised, I thought I would show an example using DPLYR. I decided to create my own data set, instead of going with a canned data set in R. I did this to preface my next few posts. After … Continue reading

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Fast Data Frame Modification in R

One of the frequent data structures I use in R is a data frame. Data frames are similar to matrices except they allow different types of variables in each column. I always rejoice when I can reduce the analysis at … Continue reading

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Short Circuiting Logical Statements in R

Short circuiting logical statements are the way ‘lazy’ programming languages evaluate logical statements.  To identify whether or not the programming language you are using is lazy or eager, reference the chart on the wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-circuit_evaluation The lazy (and quicker) … Continue reading

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Big Data Introduction

Happy Holidays! For the next few posts, I will be talking about using some tools/tricks on big data. I think that the term 'big data' gets thrown around a bit much these days. The more common definition of big data … Continue reading

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The Simplicity of Python (an example)

Previously, I posted on how to forward fill missing data in columns of data in R and Excel. I just figured out how to do this in Python, and was blown away. Ready? data = Series(['A','B','C','D','E','F'], index = [0,2,5,7,12,14]) data.reindex(range(14),method='ffill') … Continue reading

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