Ggplot2

Rookie mistakes and how to fix them when making plots of data

In this assignment, the focus was to practice data cleaning. Students suggested questions to build a class survey, to get to know the interests of other class members, and then completed the composed survey. After cleaning the data, a few summary plots of interesting aspects of the data were made. There are some common mistakes that rookies often make when constructing data plots: packing too much into a single graphic, leaving categorical variables unordered, reversing norms for response and explanatory variables, conditioning in wrong order, plotting counts when proportions should be the focus, not normalizing by counts, using a boxplot for small sample size.

Statistical computing research

During the week, I received final confirmation notice that the special issue of Statistical Science that Vince Carey and I put together is finally published. There are four papers from leaders in the field of statistical computing research: John Chambers, Duncan Temple Lang, Michael Lawrence and Michael Morgan (newly minted members of R Core) and Yihui Xie, Heike Hofmann and Xiaoyue Cheng. The links to the overview and the four papers are below.

How good is Nick Kygrios?

Nick Kygrios caught the world’s attention in July at Wimbledon 2014 when he beat world number 1 Rafael Nadal. After the match McEnroe commented: “We’ve been waiting for this for a while. We keep saying, `Who’s the next guy?‘, and I think we found that guy right now.” http://dailym.ai/1jlEfrc. but Nadal seemed to beg to differ: “He has things, positive things, to be a good player. But everything is a little bit easier when you are arriving.