Use R for more than statistical analysis

About me

Tiger Tang - Data Science Manager at CARFAX, building a team specialized in data mining and natural language processing. I am dedicated to bringing business value to data science folks using data science tools, and I am passionate about growing the Data Science community.

You may know R can do the following things

Data graphics
Data wrangling and tidying
Data Transformation
Handle iteration
Simulation
Statistical analysis/modeling

There is more!

Create tiktok materials

You probably have seen videos shows the trend of something. The #barchartrace has over 37M views on tiktok.

This is something you can totally build using R.

Create tiktok materials

Combined with image data from wiki, you can load the data as below

library(tidyverse)
plot_data <- read_csv("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CodingTigerTang/barchart_race/main/actor_earnings.csv") 
plot_data %>% 
  glimpse()

Rows: 60
Columns: 6
$ Rank     <dbl> 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 9, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, …
$ Actor    <chr> "Robert Downey Jr.", "Jennifer Lawrence", "Jackie Chan", "Vin…
$ Earnings <dbl> 80.0, 52.0, 50.0, 47.0, 41.5, 41.0, 40.0, 35.5, 33.5, 33.5, 6…
$ year     <dbl> 2015, 2015, 2015, 2015, 2015, 2015, 2015, 2015, 2015, 2015, 2…
$ img      <chr> "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/94/Ro…
$ rank     <dbl> 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10,…

Create tiktok materials

library(ggplot2)

barchart_00 <- plot_data %>% 
  ggplot(mapping = aes(x = rank, y = Earnings, fill = Actor)) + 
  geom_col() +
  labs(title = "Top 10 Best-Paid Actors from 2015 to 2020")

library(ggimage)

barchart_01 <- barchart_00 +  geom_image(aes(y = 5,size = 0.07, image = img))

library(ggplot2)
library(ggimage)

barchart_02 <- barchart_01 +
  geom_text(aes(label = paste0(Actor,round(Earnings,digits = 2)," M"))) +
  theme(axis.text.y = element_blank(),
        panel.grid = element_blank(),
        legend.position = "none",
        axis.ticks.y = element_blank(),
        axis.title.y = element_blank(),
        plot.title = element_text(size=22)) + 
  scale_y_continuous(labels = scales::label_number(suffix = " M",prefix = "$"))+
  coord_flip(expand = F,clip = "off") +  
  scale_x_reverse() +
  geom_text(aes(x=10, y= 200, label = as.factor(year)),
            vjust = 0.2, 
            alpha = 0.5,  
            col = "gray", 
            size = 20)
barchart_02

library(gganimate)

bar_race <- barchart_02 +  
  transition_states(year) + 
  enter_fade() +
  exit_fade() 
bar_race

Create tiktok materials

Explore NYC metro traffic

MTA Turnstile Data provides the entries and exits info for all New York subway turnstiles within stations. It contains weekly logs of cumulative entries and exits per turnstile per subway station at some time interval.

Explore NYC metro traffic

Data is available on MTA website.

Latitude and longitude were obtained from another data table.

Explore NYC metro traffic

library(leaflet)
leaflet() %>% 
  addTiles() %>% 
  addMarkers(lat=40.7643825, 
             lng=-73.958156, 
             popup="Weill Cornell Medicine Department of Population Health Sciences")

# Inspired by Drew Conway's post in 2011:
library(ggplot2)

hour.pos <- seq(0, 12, 12/(12*60))[1:720]
min.pos <-seq(0,12, 12/60)[1:60]
all.hours <- rep(hour.pos)
all.times <- cbind(all.hours, min.pos, 12)

i = 2
cur.time <- data.frame(list(times=c(all.times[i,1], 
                                    all.times[i,2]), 
                            hands=c(.5, 1)))

ggplot(cur.time, aes(xmin=times, xmax=times + 0.03, 
                              ymin=0, ymax=hands)) +
  geom_rect(aes(alpha=0.5))+
  scale_x_continuous(limits=c(0,all.hours[length(all.hours)]), 
                       breaks=0:11, 
                       labels=c(12, 1:11)) +
  scale_y_continuous(limits=c(0,1.1)) + 
  scale_alpha() + 
  theme_bw() +
  coord_polar() +
  theme(axis.text.y=element_blank(), 
        axis.ticks=element_blank(), 
        panel.grid.major=element_blank(), 
        strip.background = element_rect(colour = 'white'),
        legend.title = element_blank(),
        legend.position = "none")

Drew Conway’s post

library(shiny)
sliderInput("slider1", 
            label = h3("This is a regular slider"), 
            min = 0, max = 100, value = 50)

sliderInput("slider2", 
            label = h3("This is an animated slider"), 
            min = 0, max = 100, value = 50, 
            animate = T)

Explore NYC metro traffic

Check out full details on shiny gallery.

Create a “hit” game

About 20 years ago, on a device like this below, I played a number-guessing game, also known as Bulls and Cows. The hit game on New York time Wordle, is the word version of this.

library(tidyverse)
split_pluck <- function(number){str_split(number,pattern = "") %>% pluck(1) %>% unique()}

guess_this <- function(x,y) {
  
  x_numbers <- split_pluck(x)
  y_numbers <- split_pluck(y)
  
  correct <- data.frame(x_numbers,y_numbers,stringsAsFactors = F) %>% 
      mutate(compare = x_numbers == y_numbers) %>% 
      summarise(sum = sum(compare)) %>% 
      pull(sum)
    
  correct0 <- sum(x_numbers %in% y_numbers)
  if (correct > 0) {correct1 <- correct0 - correct} else {correct1 <- correct0}
  if (correct==4) { "Yeah you got it!"} else {sprintf("%sA%sB",correct,correct1)}
}

Create a “hit” game

Add the rules for new users.

Create a “hit” game

Added the feedback UI to smooth user experience.

Create a “hit” game

Like every other game, there is a leader board for people their records order by the least number of trials it took.

Create a “hit” game

In case the game gets too popular, it is also implemented with async programming, which would allow multiple users to play the game at the same time.

See the guessing in action.

Natural Language Processing

Service and Maintenance records can describe the same action in many different formats.

Let’s image solving this problem for billions of records and hundreds of services in addition to oil change.

Natural Language Processing

You can access popular deep learning frameworks with R including but not limited to the following.

Natural Language Processing

R ecosystem offers helpful tools to help get the best solutions.

Work automation

When I started as an analyst, I started handling report.

A typical report requires interacting with multiple applications
There are many steps and it is easy to make mistakes
There are many of them! (daily, weekly and monthly reports)

Work automation

I wish I could work like this…

Work automation

I realized that R may be the solution, as every application can be connected using R.

Work automation

My day after automation, I don’t even need the coffee now.

Work automation

After applying that to many processes in my organization, 12,000+ work hours have been saved. Check out the full talk on RStudio Conference 2022.

Where you can learn more

RStudio resources (data science hangout, conference talks, etc.)
#Rstats on twitter

Questions?

Find me on Linkedin or twitter.

Almost forgot, you can build website and create presentations using R as well. This presentation you are looking at is built using quarto and hosted on my website built with blogdown.