Rob McDonnell:Blog

Uk Elections 2024

political science

Well I did say I’d do another one of these come the next UK election, so here goes. The official data won’t be published until Friday the 12th of July but we can use our…

How wet was winter 2023/2024?

I’m back! It’s been years since I blogged on here. There are many reasons for that, being busy is a big one, kid, job etc.Getting a new laptop recently has renewed my…

modelscript

modelling

{modelscript} is a little RStudio add-in I wrote to help me with modelling. I’ve been testing out the tidymodels framework for R (fantastic, btw) and I thought it would be…

What do the mtcars actually look like?

dataViz

It popped into my head the other day that I had no idea what most of the cars in the mtcars dataset look like. Some Google image searches later, I had a folder of them (you…

Render RMarkdown Code Chunks Based on Output Document Type

rmarkdown

RMarkdown users – did you know you can render code chunks based on the type of output you want to produce? It’s even easy-peasy 🤓

From R to Gatsby

gatsby.js

blogging

I don’t use Gatsby or JavaScript for this blog anymore, but this post is here for posterity anyway.

Images as column headers in R

dataViz

Have you ever wanted to include an image as a column header in a data frame? Of course you have!

One liner to show all colours available in R

dataViz

Some years ago, I came across a great little repo that contained R code to display all the colours available in R. You can source it as so:

Using Docker for Data Science

docker

R

python

In this post, I’ll go through a few examples of how you can use Docker for data science, from running a simple script to making reports. It’s based on real usage, so I think…

Brazilian Legislative Data with congressbr

dataViz

political science

Recently, a paper by myself and two friends was published in the Latin American Research Review (you can read it here). As we write in the paper:

UK Elections 2019

political science

dataViz

After the UK elections in 2017, I posted about how easy it was to plot the results in R. Given that the UK just had another election, I thought I’d update that post with…

Easily Use Python and R together with {reticulate}

R

python

I work in an environment where R and Python are used interchangeably, and most of the data scientists here have some familiarity with both languages. We regularly use one…

Taking RStudio’s renv for a spin

package management

I’ve been working on a project recently where we’ve been building a data analysis pipeline that involves bits of R code and bits of Python. Since the whole thing runs on…

Improving your DataViz

dataViz

import SimpleBarChart from “../graphs/SimpleBarChart.js” import data from “../data/divorceTurnout2019.json”

Visualizing the Irish Divorce Referendum in R

dataViz

politics

A while ago, I wrote a blog post on visualizing the results of the UK elections in 2017 (quite a while ago!). After the Irish elections and divorce referendum on Friday…

Shuffling Strings in R

R

Let’s say you need to share some data that has some potentially identifiable sensitive information in it – people’s addresses, phone numbers etc. Maybe these fields are not…

Avoiding the tiresome training & test data split

modelling

I really don’t like splitting data into ‘train’ and ‘test’. I don’t mean that I’m against the idea of it, though you could say it’s a waste of data that could be used to…

Mapping Economic Partners with flagfillr

dataViz

economics

🇨🇨 🇨🇽 🇵🇹 🇩🇴 🇫🇲 🇰🇷

Stan IRT Code

IRT

Stan

(This turned out to be a bit of a ramble, for the code go here 😄)

Customize Interactive R Visuals in Power BI

dataViz

Some of us, through no fault of our own, have to work with things like Power BI. While it’s a powerful application, it’s just a little…you know. For anybody who works with…

Gauge-style plots with ggplot2

dataViz

I’ve been working on a project where the client wanted a “cockpit” style dashboard, with meter/gauge/speedometer type things. Even though this wasn’t likely to be…

UK Elections 2017

political science

dataViz

This post is a quickie to show how we can visualize the UK election results with just a few lines of R code. (Really, very few). ¹

Analyzing Prison Data in R

dataViz

political science

My good friend Danilo Freire and I have just finished a little R data package, called prisonbrief. We hope that it will be useful for R users, particularly researchers in…

TFW you have to copy and paste something into R…

R

From time to time, you might need to copy and paste something into R and turn it into a character string. Maybe it’s something from the output of an error message, or from…

Update R from inside R

I was just about to update R a while ago when I thought to myself that there must be a way to do this inside of R (RStudio, I mean). A quick Google search brought me to the i…

Peace, Bread and Data!

dataViz

economics

I really like this image by Tom Burns.¹ The liberal² in me appreciates making cheap fun of people who were horribly mistaken (Lenin; Marx, although I don’t mean to slight…

How to make a GitHub pages blog with RStudio and Hugo

blogging

Update: for some people who may have some issues setting up the blog the way I’ve set out here, see Kate’s helpful comments below.

Tips and Tricks for R Markdown html

rmarkdown

Here are a couple of little tips and tricks that I’ve picked up for use with RMarkdown html documents (including presentations and notebooks). This post is aimed at the R…

Suicides in Ireland

politics

The Irish radio station newstalk published this video the other day, in which director and actor Terry McMahon spoke out against the austerity programme running in Ireland…

Theme-Specific Voting in the European Parliament

dataViz

political science

Since it’s European Statistics Day, I thought I would make a quick post showing how to utilise some of the data that we have on the European Union in R. In particular, I…

Map-making with R and electionsBR

political science

dataViz

For those interested in Brazilian politics, there’s a great new package called electionsBR (those who understand Portuguese can find a post on it here). This package takes…

Re-creating Plots from The Economist in R and ggplot2

dataViz

economics

The Economist is well known for its graphs and images, and I personally like them a lot. I was doing some work on Brexit when I spied the image above, and thought how much I…

Inhaling/Boozing Earth

After seeing Nadieh Bremer’s great Breathing Earth infographic, I thought it would be cool to recreate it in R, as you do. Then I saw that it was made from lots of tif…

Rating R Packages

R

The new rOpenSci package packagemetrics is a new ‘meta’ package for R with info on packages: dependencies, how long issues take to be resolved, how many watchers on GitHub…

Geo-reference an image in R

dataViz

R is actually great for working with spatial data (for example, see here and here for fantastic graphs and maps made with R), however, you often need data that is actually…

Easier web scraping in R

webscraping

In an earlier post, I described some ways in which you can interact with a web browser using R and RSelenium. This is ideal when you need to access data through drop-down…

Bayesian IRT in R and Stan

IRT

Stan

MCMC

This blog post is outdated and the code will not run – for newer, cleaner IRT R code, see this github repo and this blog post.

Bayesian Stats: Book Recommendations

Bayesian stats

The first time I came across Bayes’ Theorem¹, I must admit I was pretty confused. It was in Introductory Statistics by Neil A. Weiss, the course book in a statistics course…

Web Navigation in R with RSelenium

webscraping

It goes almost without saying that the internet itself is the richest database available to us. From a 2014 blog post, it was claimed that every minute :

Write your thesis or paper in R Markdown!

rmarkdown

There are many reasons why you would want to use some variant of Markdown for writing, and indeed, posts are common on the net as to why you should.¹ A simple summary of the…

Stan or JAGS for Bayesian ideal-point IRT?

IRT

Stan

MCMC

Anybody who has ever tried to run even a moderately-sized Bayesian IRT model in R (for ideal points as in the political science literature, or otherwise) will know that…