This post shows why is.na and !is.na are not ideal approaches to “clean” a dataset with missing values when we want to compute summary statistics. A guided example: Goal for the exercise: Check whether Italy or Germany change their mind about the US president more often. Step 1:…
This is a post for people who are learning Stata. A common source of mistakes is generating a binary variable that should classify observations according to a particular condition (for example, tag everyone with income higher than 100K as a "high income individual"). The problem: an analyst will…
After running a regression, even if you just want to look at empirical correlations (i.e. you do not claim observed associations are causal) you will often need to "verbalize" the output. How can you talk about such tables honestly? The simplest thing to do seems to be…
Let's compare Q1 GDP growth vs. the rest of each year, starting in 2009: Here is the code to make the above chart: graph bar ann_growthQ1 ann_growthRest, /// bargap(5) /// graphregion(color(white)) /// over(year, gap(50) label(angle(45))) /// ytitle("Real GDP growth (percent)") /// ylabel(, angle(…
Re-posting a reminder that: Yes, interactive charts can be engaging. But many viewers will not see the data that is not shown by default. It can be rewarding to let users explore various aspects of the data, but the design costs may render the project less practical/worthwhile. Closely related…
Tutorial: reproducing a fiscal chart A few days ago, I posted a chart that looked like this [static screenshot below] The dataset is posted at: https://github.com/zilinskyjan/datasets/blob/master/fiscal/fiscal_global.csv To reproduce or experiment with the chart, you'll need to: create an app folder;…
A simple growth chart coded with rCharts var chartParams = { "element": "globalGrowth", "width": 800, "height": 400, "xkey": "year", "ykeys": [ "gr_w", "gr_noChina" ], "data": [ { "year": "2005", "gr_w": 4.95, "re_w": null, "gr_noChina": 3.78, "re_noChina": null, "gr_advanced": 2.793656, "re_advanced": null, "gr_euro": 1.764305,…
To make a chart of regional differences in GDP per capita in China, download data from China Statistical Yearbook. My final chart looks like this: Getting there takes a few steps that I show in this post . If you have a wide dataset where each row gives you a region…
General visualization principles for social scientists An Economist's Guide to Visualizing Data by Jonathan A. Schwabish [Form and Function post] Using Graphs Instead of Tables in Political Science by Jonathan P. Kastellec and Eduardo L. Leoni Narrative Visualization: Telling Stories with Data by Edward Segel and Jeffrey Heer Data Science…
In an older post on Quora, my short answer linked the output of data-based analysis with the necessity to make a recommendation or to take a decision: A common problem is that people may use a statistical exercise to make a decision with a false sense of comfort that the…