R on Dan Goldin

Visualizing GPS data in R

Wed, 05 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier today I read Nathan Yau’s post that had a quick R script to plot GPX file data onto a map. I was able to quickly load up my RunKeeper data from 2013 and came up with a pretty cool visualization of each of my outdoor runs. Since my runs occurred across multiple cities and continents the visualization turned out to be very sparse without a great sense of where the runs were. I made a two quick changes to the script to make it more useful for my data: a map overlay to see where in the world I ran and an ability to view a zoomed in area of the map. I’ve included the updated script and the resulting plots below.

Taxi prices around the world

Thu, 09 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I initially set out to add some visualizations to an earlier post comparing taxi fares between NYC and Mumbai based on some reader suggestions. After a few visualizations, I wasn’t discovering anything new and decided add taxi fare data from other cities to make it more interesting. I ended up simulating rides in different cities on worldtaximeter.com and combining that with the data from taxiautofare.com and www.numbeo.com in order to break down each city’s fare into a base fare, the included distance, the rate per local distance unit, and the rate per minute. Since each city’s fare came in local units I also had to convert to miles (sorry world) and US dollars (sorry again). Using R we generate the fares for the various combinations of distances and stoppage times and start diving into the data. As usual, the data and code are up on GitHub with contributions, corrections, and suggestions welcome. I’d also love to get the real rates for the cities so either do a pull request or let me know what they are in the comments and I’ll update the post.

Visualizing RunKeeper data in R

Sat, 04 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

What better way to celebrate running 1000 miles in 2013 than dumping the data into R and generating some visualizations? It’s also a step in my quest to replace Excel with R. I’ve included the code below with some comments as well as added it to my GitHub. If you have any ideas on what else I should do with it definitely let me know and I’ll give it a go.

RDS and R

Fri, 15 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

In my quest to replace Excel with R I’ve been spending the past week trying to do everything in R. It hasn’t been that easy with many things taking longer due to me having to reference the R docs but one thing that’s been great so far is being able to quickly run a query on Amazon’s RDS and pull data into a data frame for quick analysis. Being able to wrap this into a reusable function makes things even better. The one thing that makes it tricky was not being able to connect to RDS directly but having to tunnel through an EC2 instance. Below are the steps to replicate the setup.