Category Archives: R

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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Separating Blocks of Numbers in Columns of Data

More and more I'm using the 'apply' functions in R (apply, mapply, sapply, lappy,...). The help functions on these are hard to decipher. Not till I read a post by Neil Saunders, did I really start using them instead of … Continue reading

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Prime Time Calculation

Number theory has always interested me, specifically irrational numbers and prime numbers.   I was messing around with functions in R and came up with a very neat ‘one line’ function in R that checks if a number is prime.  See … Continue reading

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