I like heatplots with p-values -or frequencies, or whatever-. Not very conclusive, but pretty anyway. And when talking about graphs, pretty will make our neurons to fire in more interesting ways: neurons like “pretty” graphs. Moreover, observing your data can be as important as analysing it. It’s better to observe, to listen your patients than making tests without knowing very much about them… In the heatmaps of the previous post, not a lot of information can be included.

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Some months ago, I had to explore a vast amount of categorical variables before making some multivariate analyses. One good way to know your raw data, to make new hypotheses…etc, is to calculate some pairwise “crude” chi-square tests of independence of your factors, but it can be very time-consuming. I mean, not time-consuming to make the tests (with a simple command it can be done), but to revise all of them.

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“LaTeX is a high-quality typesetting system; it includes features designed for the production of technical and scientific documentation, and is the de facto standard for the communication and publication of scientific documents.” It is also… Free and Open. Specially designed for beautiful documents even when they include special language: mathematic formulae, phonetic symbols, musical notation… The mix of normal text with special languages is indeed much better arranged in LaTeX than in any other text editor, so maybe it can be interesting for you!

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INTRODUCTION CONFIGURING SWEAVE FOR TEXWORKS In MS Windows In (K)Ubuntu & MacOSX WRITING A .RNW FILE EDIT FOR TEXWORKS IN UBUNTU FURTHER READINGS INTRODUCTION Sweave is nothing more, nothing less than one of the best ways R can connect with a text editor, in this case LaTeX. So you don’t know anyting about LaTeX? neither did I 8 months ago… The hyperlinks in this post will take you to some great pages, to learn different things in an organised way.

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…about R, for beginners

These days I was remembering my beginnings as a linux user few years ago, and how I found R (possibly in a very unlikely way: searching for a SPSS alternative in Linux). For two years, R had been almost impossible for me. I didn’t understand its syntax (I don’t have programming background), and luckily I had installed R Commander (Rcmdr) to perform simple analysis and plots… Another feature of Rcmdr (that I didn’t use) was that every click to a button remains in a part of Rcmdr’s console, and then it can be copied, used and modified.

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Reinhart, Rogoff... and R

Reinhart, Rogoff… and R EDIT: At the time I wrote this post, I didn’t know of the existence of this great one, from Christopher Gandrud, take a look! On april, the 15th, an article was published that will change economic theories… Or at least, it will questionate and change the methods employed to formule those theories. As a doctor, I spend time on reviewing evidence that can be applied to daily practice.

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Watercolor plots

R has been recognised as the most powerful statistical tool for displaying graphs. In the last years, R’s awesomeness in depicting relationships between variables is exploding with great packages such as ggplot2. One can simply walk around some R blogs, and find something like this: The ‘watercolor’ plot (aka à la Solomon Hsiang). Once you click these links above, you will forget completely about my blog, so… wait! I have to show a graph I made with the code provided there!

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Author's picture

aurora-mareviv

Anesthesiologist, MD, postdoc. Utter Rstats geek

Universidade de Santiago de Compostela

Spain