Lots of people wouldn’t really consider tools like ‘ggplot’ true visualization tools, but in some disciplines it’s exactly what’s called for: Simple visualization with no fuss. A talk given by Hadley Wickman, and available online, discusses its use along with the popular statistics package R.
Data analysis, the process of converting data into knowledge, insight and understanding, is a critical part of statistics, but there’s surprisingly little research on it. In this talk I’ll introduce some of my recent work, including a model of data analysis. I’m a passionate advocate of programming that data analysis should be carried out using a programming language, and I’ll justify this by discussing some of the requirement of good data analysis (reproducibility, automation and communication). With these in mind, I’ll introduce you to a powerful set of tools for better understanding data: the statistical programming language R, and the ggplot2 domain specific language (DSL) for visualisation.
