mages' blog

Notes from the Tokyo R User Group meeting, 17 April 2014

Last Thursday I had the pleasure to attend the Tokyo R user group meeting. And what a fun meeting it was! Over 40 R users had come together in central Tokyo. Yohei Sato, who organises the meetings, allowed me to talk a little about the recent developments of the googleVis package.


Thankfully all talks were given in English:

• Takashi J. Ozaki presented on Visualisation of Supervised Learning with arules and arulesViz.
• Shinichi Takayanagi showed how rMaps can be used to visualise geographical data of trading bitcoins.
• Shota Yasui used a motion chart to visualise the demand and supply cycles of salmons in Norway.
• Daisuke Ichikawa demonstrated that R can also be used to keep us motivated by saying 'yeah', or better use data to produce music that sounds like a 25 year old Gameboy.

Following the meeting the user group had booked a pub around the corner for a few drinks and some food. Brilliant!

Delicious chicken steaks and rice porridge

The next morning, as I woke up in on the 23rd hotel floor in Shinjuku I felt that my bed was moving. I am sure it was the earthquake, but what a weird feeling it was with a little hangover.

googleVis 0.5.1 released on CRAN

GoogleVis 0.5.1 was released on CRAN yesterday.

New Features

• New functions gvisSankey, gvisAnnotationChart, gvisHistogram,
gvisCalendar and gvisTimeline to support the new Google charts of the same names (without 'gvis').
• New demo Trendlines showing how trend-lines can be added to Scatter-, Bar-, Column-, and Line Charts.
• New demo Roles showing how different column roles can be used in core charts to highlight data.
• New vignettes written in R Markdown showcasing googleVis examples and how the package works with knitr.

Changes

• The help files of gvis charts no longer show all their options, instead a link to the online Google API documentation is given.
• Updated googleVis demo
• All googleVis output will be displayed in your default browser. In previous versions of googleVis output could also be viewed in the preview pane of RStudio. This feature is no longer available with the current version of RStudio, but is likely to be introduced again with the release of RStudio version 0.99 or higher.

I will discuss the new features in more detail at the R user group meetings in Tokyo this Thursday and in Cologne, 23 May.

Annotation charts and histograms with googleVis

After my posts on timeline, Sankey and calendar charts, this will be the last to introduce new chart types of the developer version of googleVis. Today I will give examples for the new annotation charts and histograms.

Annotation charts

Annotation charts have been part of the Google Chart tools for a long time and googleVis as well. However, in the past only a flash based version was available (gvisAnnotatedTimeLine in googleVis). With the new Google Charts Tools version also a HTML5 version was released. In googleVis it is integrated as gvisAnnotationChart. It works in exactly the same way as the Flash based version, so here is an example.



For the R code below to run you will require the developer version (≥ 0.5.0-4) of googleVis from GitHub and R ≥ 3.0.2.

Histograms

Histograms are a new chart type in Google Chart Tools API - not so in R. Still, it is nice to know that one can create those now as well.


For more information and installation instructions see the googleVis project site and Google documentation.

Session Info

R version 3.0.3 (2014-03-06)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin10.8.0 (64-bit)

locale:
[1] en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/C/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base     

other attached packages:
[1] googleVis_0.5.0-4

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] RJSONIO_1.0-3 tools_3.0.3 

Calendar charts with googleVis

My little series of posts about the new googleVis charts continues with calendar charts.

Google's calendar charts are still in beta, but they provide already a nice heat map visualisation of calendar year data. The current development version of googleVis supports this new function via gvisCalendar. Here is an example displaying daily stock price data.


For the code below to run you will require the developer version (≥ 0.5.0-4) of googleVis from GitHub and R ≥ 3.0.2.

I suppose the biggest current drawback is that the colours of the cells cannot be defined by the user. However, this should change with future versions of the Google Chart Tools. For more information and installation instructions see the googleVis project site and Google documentation.

Interestingly, the calendar chart looks very similar to the visualisation R. Wicklin and R. Allison from SAS used for the winning poster at the Data Expo 2009. Paul Bleicher created a function in R, based on lattice that creates a very similar output. You may recall David Smith's blog post about this.

Session Info

R version 3.0.3 (2014-03-06)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin10.8.0 (64-bit)

locale:
[1] en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/C/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] grid stats graphics grDevices utils datasets  methods  
[8] base     

other attached packages:
[1] googleVis_0.5.0-4 chron_2.3-45 lattice_0.20-24  

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] RJSONIO_1.0-3 tools_3.0.3