What I'm Thinking

Coronavirus
17 March 2020

Inspired by lots of media attention (putting it mildly), let’s examine some public data on COVID-19 (aka “Coronavirus”) positive tests and fatalities. This work was inspired by Isaac Faber, who posted some code on his github repo. At time of publishing, the White House has issued a "call to action" from AI researchers. Public data has been made available here. Note that no maps will be created as I feel this simply cannot be outdone. ... Read More

NFL Tree and Cap Spending
28 September 2019

Let’s explore the package ‘collapsableTree’ using NFL data. I foraged the internet to create a fairly simple csv file with columns Sport, Division, Region, Team, and Cap_Spend. The values in Cap_Spend are the team’s active (2020) active salary spends per OverTheCap.com. Let’s get R set-up and then we can explore. # Set CRAN Mirror options(repos = c(CRAN = "http://cran.rstudio.com")) # Set time zone options(tz="America/New_York") We’re going to use the collapsableTree library to create the visualization. ... Read More

Hurricane Dorian in the News
22 September 2019

The ‘newsflash’ package is something I played with back in 2017 during Hurricane Irma. Having recently been under watch for Dorian, I’m revisiting it to visualize it’s news coverage. # Set CRAN Mirror options(repos = c(CRAN = "http://cran.rstudio.com")) # Set time zone options(tz="America/New_York") # Newsflash documentation # https://github.com/hrbrmstr/newsflash # Install packages # devtools::install_github("hrbrmstr/newsflash") # install.packages("tidyverse") # install.packages("ggalt") # install.packages("brbrthemes") # install.packages("anytime") # Load libraries library(newsflash) ## NOTE: There are breaking changes to the package API due to GDELT's v2 API library(tidyverse) ## ── Attaching packages ───────────────────────────────────────── tidyverse 1.2.1 ── ## ✔ ggplot2 3.0.0 ✔ purrr 0.2.5 ## ✔ tibble 1.4.2 ✔ dplyr 0.7.6 ## ✔ tidyr 0.8.1 ✔ stringr 1.3.1 ## ✔ readr 1.1.1 ✔ forcats 0.3.0 ## ── Conflicts ──────────────────────────────────────────── tidyverse_conflicts() ── ## ✖ dplyr::filter() masks stats::filter() ## ✖ dplyr::lag() masks stats::lag() library(ggalt) library(hrbrthemes) ## NOTE: Either Arial Narrow or Roboto Condensed fonts are *required* to use these themes. ... Read More

Starbucks iOS App Analysis
16 September 2019

Have you ever wanted to see more detail behind apps on your iOS device? There’s an R package called ‘itunesr’ that allows for free extracts of user ratings and reviews. Combining that with some sentiment analysis, you can examine any trends for apps of interest. First, you’ll need to identify an app of interest. I use the Starbucks app quite a bit and have read numerous articles about it’s success. So, let’s see if ‘itunesr’ tells a similar story. ... Read More
My sister is a Pharmacist. My wife is an Environmental Scientist / Project Manager. They’re both interested in Public Health, though they work in very different environments. Then there’s me: which box do you check for Revenue Management Analyst or Data Scientist? To try and define my role, I compared three defined options: Financial Analysts, Business Intelligence Analysts and Industrial Engineers. I felt these might be most representative of what I do. ... Read More