A couple of months ago I wrote a short blog post about a new library I discovered: openxlsx. Here’s a very short blog post as a followup. To read in Excel files in R using the openxlsx library, I use the following function: However, one day, I ran into the…
Without a doubt, Pandas is one of the most popular Python packages within Data Science. However, coming from an R background, discovering the difference between the join and merge method was mind-boggling. Especially if it generates confusing errors that urge you to use pd.concat, which you shouldn’t. This is the…
2020: the year that every data scientist became a virologist. For the past weeks we’ve been numbed with statistics and plots about the coronavirus. A recurring feature of these plots is that they often have a logarithmic axes. Here’s how to achieve this in R’s ggplot2. Lets’s say you are…
In this blog post I elaborate on anti-aliasing in R. Some feedback I received quite a while is that the plots produced by ggplot2 in R aren’t as pretty as those produced by Microsoft Office, or even Python’s Matplotlib. This feedback is justified, because R doesn’t anti-alias it’s produced plots.…
One of the aspects of a visualization I have been ignoring for most of the time, is animation. I saw a LinkedIn post on gganimate and I decided it was time for me to deal with the final frontier of visualization. Half the world is in quarantaine and financial media…
In the past couple of years, I have been messing around to get weekdays in my ggplot2 charts. However, I discovered a pretty straightforward method to do it properly. All those hours wasted, but no more. I will demonstrate with an example. I use data.table for wrangling, and lubridate for…
As you could have guess from my previous blog post, I started using Microsoft’s Power Platform intensively for a project in healthcare. A thing that surprised me is how easy it is to generate PDFs, for example for generating specific lists, using PowerAutomate. That is, if you’re fond of OneDrive.…
No-code and low-code development platforms are the hype of 2020. Luckily, I had the honor of working on a business application for one of our clients. Since the whole sector is entrenched in the Microsoft ecosystem, PowerApps was a logical choice. It’s a great tool, but sometimes behaves in unexpected…
In this blog post I elaborate on the reality that statistical models often obscure the fact that some problems can actually be solved in a way that requires less time, resources and headaches. By using reference models and heuristics, decision makers can evaluate if those seemingly brilliant consultants are solving…
I recently took a course in Microsoft PowerQuery, a visual user interface to data wrangling. It’s nowhere as powerful as Python’s pandas for example, but it does provide a convenient way for analysts without coding skills to clean small to medium-sized datasets. One aspect I found to be really intuitive…