📊 streamline your analyses linking R to sas and more: the workfloweR experiment 🖥

we all know R is the first choice for statistical analysis and data visualisation, but what about big data munging? tidyverse (or we’d better say hadleyverse 😏) has been doing a lot in this field, nevertheless it is often the case this kind of activities being handled from some other coding language. Moreover, sometimes you get as an input pieces of analyses performed with other kind of languages or, what is worst, piece of databases packed in proprietary format (like .dta .xpt and other). So let’s assume you are an R enthusiast like I am, and you do with R all of your work, reporting included, wouldn’t be great to have some nitty gritty way to merge together all these languages in a streamlined workflow?

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Euro 2016 analytics: Who’s playing the toughest game?

I am really enjoying Uefa Euro 2016 Footbal Competition, even because our national team has done pretty well so far. That’s why after  browsing for a while statistics section of official EURO 2016 website I decided to do some analysis on the data they share ( as at the 21th of June).

Just to be clear from the beginning: we are not talking of anything too rigourus, but just about some interesting questions with related answers gathered mainly through data visualisation.

We can divide following analyses into two main parts: a first part were we analyse distribution of fouls and their incidence on matches outcome and a second part where ball possession in analysed, once again looking at relationship between this stat and matches outcome. Let’s start with fouls then.

which team committed the  greatest number of fouls?

Here we are with the first question. And here it is the answer:

Over 50 practical recipes for data analysis with R in one book

Ah, writing a blog post! This is a pleasure I was forgetting, and you can guess it looking at last post date of publication: it was around january... you may be wondering: what have you done along this long time? Well, quite a lot indeed:

• changed my job ( I am now working @ Intesa Sanpaolo Banking Group on Basel III statistical models)
• became dad for the third time (and if you are guessing, it’s a boy!)
• fixed some issues with the updateR package
• and I wrote a book!

Hope this pretty long list will help you forgive me for my long silence. I am actually pretty proud of all of them, but let’s talk about the book now. I think it is an useful contribution to the R community. But first of all, the title:

RStudio for R Statistical Computing Cookbook

how to list loaded packages in R: ramazon gets cleaver

It was around midnight here in Italy:
I shared the code on Github, published a post on G+, Linkedin and Twitter and then went to bed.

In the next hours things got growing by themselves, with pleasant results like the following:

Indeed – @AndreaCirilloAC's ramazon() is a godsend to #Shiny devs! https://t.co/gh4J0HyDce https://t.co/OmNgOBZ38e

— Chris von Csefalvay (@DoodlingData) August 22, 2015

The R community found ramazon a really helpful package.

And I actually think it is: Amazon AWS is nowadays one of the most common tools for online web applications and websites hosting.

The possibility to get your Shiny App on it just running a function make it even more desirable for the amusing R people.

Therefore, even if I developed ramazon for personal purposes , I now feel some kind of responsibility to further develop it and take it updated.

Introducing Afraus: an Unsupervised Fraud Detection Algorithm

The last Report to the Nation published by ACFE, stated that on average, fraud accounts for nearly the 5% of companies revenues.

on average, fraud accounts for nearly the 5% of companies revenues

Projecting this number for the whole world GDP, it results that the “fraud-country” produces something like a GDP 3 times greater than the Canadian GDP.

Catching Fraud with Benford’s law (and another Shiny App)

In the early ‘900 Frank Benford observed that ‘1’ was more frequent as first digit in his own logarithms manual.

More than one hundred years later, we can use this curious finding to look for fraud on populations of data.

just give a try to the shiny app

What ‘Benford’s Law’ stands for?

Around 1938 Frank Benford, a physicist at the General Electrics research laboratories, observed that logarithmic tables were more worn within first pages: was this casual or due to an actual prevalence of numbers near 1 as first digits?

Network Visualisation With R

The main reason why

After all, I am still an Internal Auditor. Therefore I often face one of the typical internal auditors problems: understand links between people and companies, in order to discover the existence of hidden communities that could expose the company to unknown risks.

the solution: linker

In order to address this problem I am developing Linker, a lean shiny app that take 1 to 1 links as an input and gives as output a network map:

click the picture to reach the app

Best Practices for Scientific Computing

I reproduce here below principles from the amazing paper Best Practices for Scientific Computing, published on 2012 by a group of US and UK professors. The main purpose of the paper is to “teach”  good programming habits shared from professional developers to people  that weren’t born developer, and became developers just for professional purposes.

Scientists spend an increasing amount of time building and using software. However, most scientists are never taught how to do this efficiently

1. Write programs for people, not computers.

   1. a program should not require its readers to hold more than a handful of facts in memory at once
   2. names should be consistent, distinctive and meaningful
   3. code style and formatting should be consistent
   4. all aspects of software development should be broken down into tasks roughly an hour long

excel right() function in R

as part of the excel functions in R, I have developed this custom function, reproducing the excel right() function in th R language. Feel free to copy and use it.

right = function (string, char){
substr(string,nchar(string)-(char-1),nchar(string))}

you can find other function in the Excel functions in R post.

excel left() function in R

as part of the excel functions in R, I have developed this custom function, emulating the excel left() function in th R language. Feel free to copy and use it.

left = function (string,char){

 substr(string,1,char)}

you can find other function in the Excel functions in R post.