March 2021 – Quant Knot

LIS 4370 R Programming: Debugging

Debugging is a critical skill for any programmer. Not very many enjoy it, the process often involves lots of intense googling, reading help pages and incomplete documentation, and occasionally the sacrificing of chickens. This week I have been given a chunk of code that contains a deliberate bug. You can…

By Simon Liles March 28, 2021LIS 4370 R Programming, School Work

LIS 4317 Data Visualization School Work

LIS 4317 Data Visualization: Making a Tufte Style Visualization

Edward Tufte set out principles of design for the visualization of data. One of the big take aways from his teachings is to maximize the amount of data in a visualization, and minimize the amount of ink that is used. Often extraneous markings on a visual will just obscure the…

By Simon Liles March 28, 2021LIS 4317 Data Visualization, School Work

LIS 4317 Data Visualization School Work

LIS 4317 Data Visualization: Visualizing Time Series Data

A lot of data is simply a few of variables that can be plotted in almost any way you want to. Then we have time series data, which adds a time component, and not only is it continuous, but it also defines the order of the points. Time series plots…

By Simon Liles March 21, 2021LIS 4317 Data Visualization, School Work

LIS 4370 R Programming School Work

LIS 4370 R Programming: Building my Own R Package

Recently I have started building my own R Package as a part of a project with my professor, Dr. Friedman. The project involves visual analytics of proteins and requires we build our own R package. The project is still in the very early stages, so the package is also still…

By Simon Liles March 20, 2021LIS 4370 R Programming, School Work

LIS 4370 R Programming School Work

LIS 4370 R Programming: Visualization in R

One of the best parts of R is the ease at which visualizations of data can be created. Beyond the base library there are many packages that make visualization a powerful tool, such as lattice and ggplot2. For a while now I have been learning ggplot2 and I have become…

By Simon Liles March 14, 2021LIS 4370 R Programming, School Work

LIS 4317 Data Visualization School Work

LIS 4317 Data Visualization: Multivariate Analysis and the 5 Principles of Design

This week was multivariate analysis. Generally useful data has more than 2 variables and to find a useful pattern, many of those variables need to be plotted together in a two dimensional space. While we could go up to 3D, that is generally not recommended for a variety of reasons,…

By Simon Liles March 13, 2021LIS 4317 Data Visualization, School Work

LIS 4370 R Programming School Work

LIS 4370 R Programming: Input and Output

One of the most important aspects to any program is the ability to take in data, and after doing its process, saving the data. This is generally done through the input and output libraries of a programming language. In JAVA, it is done with the java.io library. In the R…

By Simon Liles March 7, 2021LIS 4370 R Programming, School Work

LIS 4317 Data Visualization School Work

LIS 4317 Data Visualization: Correlation Analysis

Correlation and Regression analysis are very powerful tools when exploring data. These two forms of analysis are very useful when it comes to process improvement, take the case of a plant that converts ammonia into nitric acid. After the ammonia has been oxidized, it is passed into an absorption tower…

By Simon Liles March 7, 2021LIS 4317 Data Visualization, School Work