Skip to main content

World Bank Visualizations with googleVis

Building on the last post: I just put together a short slideshow explaining how to use R to create Google Motion Charts with World Bank data. It uses the packages googleVis and WDI. It mostly builds on the example from Mage's Blog post. I just simplified it with the WDI package (and used national finance related variables).
Labels:

Comments

mages said…
Hi Christopher,

Thanks for pointing out the deck.js library. This seems to be a good solution to present results using the googleVis library. I will use your idea on my blog as well.

Regards

Markus
16:27
Vincent said…
Hey Christopher,

I got to this slideshow from the `slidify` website. I'm glad you're finding the WDI package useful!

A quick style thing: WDI will merge a bunch of indicators for you if you just feed it a vector of indicator strings. For example,

dat <- WDI(indicator=c("DT.DOD.DPNG.CD",""DT.DOD.DECT.GN.ZS"))
head(dat)

Best,

Vincent

PS: It appears we know some of the same people: Cassie G. and Bill C.
14:37
Vincent said…
Without the two consecutive double-quotes, of course
14:39
Unknown said…
Hi Vincent

Thanks for pointing to a solution for the unnecessary verbiage.

Also, thanks for the WDI package, as a heavy user of World Bank data it is definitely helpful.

P.S. Are you going to be at APSA presenting your and Bill's fed paper?
12:09
Vincent said…
I'd love to go to APSA, especially since I've never been to NO. But unfortunately, at the moment I'm leaning towards "probably not".
14:56
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dropbox & R Data

I'm always looking for ways to download data from the internet into R. Though I prefer to host and access plain-text data sets (CSV is my personal favourite) from GitHub (see my short paper on the topic) sometimes it's convenient to get data stored on Dropbox . There has been a change in the way Dropbox URLs work and I just added some functionality to the repmis R package. So I though that I'ld write a quick post on how to directly download data from Dropbox into R. The download method is different depending on whether or not your plain-text data is in a Dropbox Public folder or not. Dropbox Public Folder Dropbox is trying to do away with its public folders. New users need to actively create a Public folder. Regardless, sometimes you may want to download data from one. It used to be that files in Public folders were accessible through non-secure (http) URLs. It's easy to download these into R, just use the read.table command, where the URL is the file name...
57 comments
Read more

Slide: one function for lag/lead variables in data frames, including time-series cross-sectional data

I often want to quickly create a lag or lead variable in an R data frame. Sometimes I also want to create the lag or lead variable for different groups in a data frame, for example, if I want to lag GDP for each country in a data frame. I've found the various R methods for doing this hard to remember and usually need to look at old blog posts . Any time we find ourselves using the same series of codes over and over, it's probably time to put them into a function. So, I added a new command– slide –to the DataCombine R package (v0.1.5). Building on the shift function TszKin Julian posted on his blog , slide allows you to slide a variable up by any time unit to create a lead or down to create a lag. It returns the lag/lead variable to a new column in your data frame. It works with both data that has one observed unit and with time-series cross-sectional data. Note: your data needs to be in ascending time order with equally spaced time increments. For example 199...
48 comments
Read more

A Link Between topicmodels LDA and LDAvis

Carson Sievert and Kenny Shirley have put together the really nice LDAvis R package. It provides a Shiny-based interactive interface for exploring the output from Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic models. If you've never used it, I highly recommend checking out their XKCD example (this paper also has some nice background). LDAvis doesn't fit topic models, it just visualises the output. As such it is agnostic about what package you use to fit your LDA topic model. They have a useful example of how to use output from the lda package. I wanted to use LDAvis with output from the topicmodels package. It works really nicely with texts preprocessed using the tm package. The trick is extracting the information LDAvis requires from the model and placing it into a specifically structured JSON formatted object. To make the conversion from topicmodels output to LDAvis JSON input easier, I created a linking function called topicmodels_json_ldavis . The full function is below. To...
25 comments
Read more