Wordclouds are one of the most visually straightforward, compelling ways of displaying text info in a graph. Of course, we have a lot of web pages (and even apps) that, given an input text, will plot you some nice tagclouds. However, when you need reproducible results, or getting done complex tasks -like combined wordclouds from several files-, a programming environment may be the best option. In R, there are (as always), several alternatives to get this done, such as tagcloud and wordcloud.

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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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aurora-mareviv

Anesthesiologist, MD, postdoc. Utter Rstats geek

Universidade de Santiago de Compostela

Spain