Linguist Martin Schweinberger has used base R to perform a sociolinguistic analysis of swear word use in Irish English. The data analyzed is from the Irish component of the International Corpus of English. I'm particularly tickled by the fact that the script contains a set of regular expressions that define swear words. For instance search.pattern2 <- c (" [A|a]rse [s|d]{0 ,1} ") Turns out … [Read more...]
FiveThirtyEight data
FiveThirtyEight are sharing the data and code behind some of their articles. A goldmine for those wishing to learn more about data science. … [Read more...]
Real-world datasets for learning data science in R
R comes with a range datasets that can be used when learning the basics or trying out a new approach/package. mtcars and weather` are popular choices. However, most of the common datasets are "toy" examples. They are great for practising basic techniques, but are useless when it comes to realistically simulating data science tasks. The dslabs package provides datasets more suited to exploring … [Read more...]
Data organization in spreadsheets
Karl Broman and Kara Woo offer some good advice on organizing data in spreadsheets. They advocate confining the use of spreadsheets to data entry and storage---moving calculations and visualizations to other tools. This certainly avoids some of the biggest problems with using spreadsheets. However, spreadsheets don't enforce any discipline. It's up to the user to be vigilant and do the right … [Read more...]
7 problems with spreadsheets
Using Excel in business critical operations is risky to the point of recklessness. Phocas have just published an article highlighting seven problems with spreadsheets. The problems are susceptibility to human errors difficulties in troubleshooting lack of agility lack of collaborative features lack of support for rapid decision-making degree of complexity for the average business user security … [Read more...]