Evolving notes, images and sounds by Luis Apiolaza

Category: rblogs (Page 2 of 22)

Implementing a model as an R package

In our research group we often have people creating statistical models that end up in publications but, most of the time, the practical implementation of those models is lacking. I mean, we have a bunch of barely functioning code that is very difficult to use in a reliable way in operations of the breeding programs. I was very keen on continue using one of the models in our research, enough to rewrite and document the model fitting, and then create another package for using the.model in operations.

Unfortunately, neither the data nor the model are mine to give away, so I can’t share them (yet). But I hope these notes will help you in you are in the same boat and need to use your models (or ‘you’ are in fact future me, who tend to forget how or why I wrote code in a specific way).

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Reading a folder with many small files

One of the tools we use in our research is NIR (Near-Infrared Spectroscopy), which we apply to thousands of samples to predict their chemical composition. Each NIR spectrum is contained in a CSV text file with two numerical columns: wavelength and reflectance. All files have the same number of rows (1296 in our case), which corresponds to the number of wavelengths assessed by the spectrometer. One last thing: the sample ID is encoded in the file name.

As an example, file A1-4-999-H-L.0000.csv’s contents look like:

8994.82461,0.26393
8990.96748,0.26391
8987.11035,0.26388
8983.25322,0.26402
8979.39609,0.26417
...

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Calculating parliament seats allocation and quotients

I was having a conversation about dropping the minimum threshold (currently 5% of the vote) for political parties to get representation in Parliament. The obvious question is how would seat allocation change, which of course involved a calculation. There is a calculator in the Electoral Commission website, but trying to understand how things work (and therefore coding) is my thing, and the Electoral Commission has a handy explanation of the Sainte-Laguë allocation formula used in New Zealand. So I had to write my own seat allocation function: Continue reading

Collecting results of the New Zealand General Elections

I was reading an article about the results of our latest elections where I was having a look at the spatial pattern for votes in my city.

I was wondering how would I go over obtaining the data for something like that and went to the Electoral Commission, which has this neat page with links to CSV files with results at the voting place level. The CSV files have results for each of the candidates in the first few rows (which I didn’t care about) and at the party level later in the file.

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Where are New Zealand’s bellwether electorates?

I was reading a piece by Graeme Edgeler who, near the end, asked “Where are New Zealand’s bellwether electorates?”. I didn’t know where the data came from or how was the “index of disproportionality for each electorate” calculated, but I saw it mostly as an opportunity to whip up some quick code to practice the use of R and look at other packages that play well with the tidyverse.

The task can be described as: fetch Wikipedia page with results of the 2014 parliamentary election, extract the table with results by electorate, calculate some form of deviation from the national results, get the top X electorates with lowest deviation from national results.
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