useR day three
The last post perhaps was a bit over-long on extraneous detail and bits of R-commands that most readers will either know backwards or have no interest in, and today’s learning sheet is over double the length of yesterday’s, so let’s really do one thing I learned today. One thing I learned today was about the RTextTools package which sounds like a great way of classifying textual data. I’ve already had a go with some text stuff in a previous post but I hadn’t really thought about the whole data mining/ machine learning thing all that seriously until today.
Day 2 of useR
Well, I said I was going to blog at least one thing I learned at the conference each day, today I’ve learned about 50 million things (yesterday was tutorials so I learned two things well; seen 20 presentations today, posters later). To be honest I think this post is going to be more use to me in remembering everything than it will be to anyone else, but I’ll try to do it properly.
useR conference update
I’m at the useR! conference so I’ll be blogging every day with at least one thing that I learned. The first thing, which I think I half-knew and had also half-learned from bitter experience, is that all the R experts seem to use Linux, Ubuntu in the case of the two people who ran the tutorials I attended today. I already dual-boot Windows and Linux and I think over time I’m going to reduce Windows to the operating system on which I play games and check my work email (which I can only get to run on Windows due to security software requirements).
How do interest rates affect the way my mortgage is paid off?
With a baby on the way my wife and I have become very interested in the interest rate on our mortgage, and how it might go up or down, and how that will affect whether we overpay to build up some equity, etc. etc. etc. As you will know if you’ve ever thought about your mortgage payments, it’s all quite complicated and difficult to think about. For a bit of fun I thought I would produce a graph which summarises the value of the mortgage over time as well as the proportion of the money which is spent on capital and interest payments.
New book- The visual display of quantitative information
Took delivery of a new book today, Tufte’s Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Obviously it’s a classic but I had no idea what a beautiful book it is. Camera doesn’t do it justice: Full of wonderful illustrations from throughout the ages as well. I’ll cover this and some of my favourite books past and present in future posts.
Fun with wordclouds
As always, I’m late to this party, and wordclouds have come under fire in recent times, e.g. here: drewconway.com. From my point of view they’re eye-catching, and I hope that by putting them up on a website or in a report they might cause people to linger and look in more detail at other pieces of data and visualisation. That’s all I’m going to say for now, I’m sure I’ll talk again about what’s attractive to data scientists and statisticians and what’s attractive to the general public, but let’s leave it for now.
The patient survey: past, present and future
Within my organisation we have something known as the Service User and Carer Experience Survey, often abbreviated to the SUCE, or in more natural spoken English, the patient survey. It’s a chance for the users of our services to tell us about our services and includes Likert-type “ticky box” questions about specific aspects of care as well as an open section in which they can give an area for improvement as well as something they like about the service.
Welcome to the blog
Inspired by the many excellent blogs about research, statistics, and computing I have finally decided to set up my own. My work for Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust and the Institute of Mental Health comprises advice and consultancy, research and evaluation, and data visualisation. I like to use R for my statistics, and have recently started making reproducible research using Sweave and odfWeave. Over time I have found I need to write more and more code and I am studying Java in October to help me on the way to being a proper programmer.