Lansing Area R Users Group (laRUG) with Data Science
The Lansing Area R Users Group (laRUG) brings together R users in the Lansing area for discussions on data science (analysis and predictive modeling), big data, and all things R. This group provides a relaxed environment to exchange ideas and discuss R. Whether you are new to R (and programming), a statistician, or an advanced user, we are the group for you.
December 2016 Notes on Tableplots, Notebooks with R Markdown, dygraphs, and a traffic accident dataset
The December 2016 meetup focused on various ways to initially explore a dataset along with using RStudio’s Notebooks with R Markdown.
Tableplots from the tabplot R package “is a powerful visualization method to explore and analyze large multivariate datasets.” The package authors demonstrate the importance of exploring large datasets using tableplots in their June 2015 Significance article link to freely accessible article. Tabplot uses ggplot2 to construct the plots and there is an informative vignette vignette link demonstrating the use of tabplots via the diamonds dataset.
Notebooks with R Markdown are an excellent way to share the results of an analysis along with the workflow and associated R code. RStudio had a webinar webinar link during the summer of 2016 to showcase the features and benefits of using a Notebook compared to the standard R Markdown document (“HTML, PDF, MS Word, Beamer, HTML5 slides, Tufte-style handouts, books, dashboards, shiny applications, scientific articles, and websites to name a few”) constructed with knitr. When creating an analysis document for general audiences and/or R-users, Notebooks provide flexibility and reproducible workflows.
dygraphs is a new R package for constructing interactive plots within R Markdown documents. These plots focus on the ability for a user to interact with time series data. More information is available here.
Access to large datasets is becoming commonplace and the US Department of Transportation along with Crash Stats of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration provides a large amount of traffic accident related data. Check out and explore the FARS data tables here!