HighlandR

Thoughts on the NHS-R conference

Posted on October 31, 2018

It’s been a few weeks since the first NHS-R conference was held in Birmingham. I co-presented a couple of workshops with Neil Pettinger on visualising patient flow, covering the following importing from Excel (and connecting to SQL Server) dplyr ggplot2 & plotly ... [Read More]

Where am I?

Notes on the here package

Posted on September 23, 2018

The here package is pretty simple ( only 3 functions), but I keep messing things up when I try to create paths with it, so this is my aide-memoire. It might be useful for others too. Here finds the root of your current folder / working directory. If you use... [Read More]

Mid Table Mediocrity

Visualising potential winners in the Scottish Championship

Posted on August 11, 2018

Last August, I was given a surprise gift of a season ticket to watch my local football team, Inverness Caledonian Thistle. They’d been relegated from the top league in Scotland the season before, and needed all the local support they could get. In truth, the gift ( from my father)... [Read More]

More tidy evaluation with ggplot2

Following up the follow up

Posted on July 4, 2018

After my previous post, my good friend David Henderson asked a good question on Twitter ( it happens :)) To be honest, I hadn’t even noticed there was no tilde (the ‘~’ ) in my call to facet_wrap. So I did a little experiment :... [Read More]

Tidily evaluated ggplot2

Test driving the new release of ggplot2

Posted on July 4, 2018

A new release of ggplot2 Now that tidy evaluation is baked into ggplot2, as of TODAY, let’s take it for a spin: ggplot2 3.0.0 %>% create function %>% test function %>% end library(dplyr) library(ggplot2<span... [Read More]

Even Simpler SQL

Posted on June 3, 2018

I’ve had some feedback on the last post, and rather than repeat the same thing multiple times, I’m going all @drob, and writing this instead.. When I tweeted out the link to my post I gave it the tag line “why I’d rather write dplyr than SQL”. What I... [Read More]

simpler SQL with dplyr

comparing dplyr with SQL nested queries

Posted on June 1, 2018

Following on from my last post, where I demonstrated R to some first time R users, I want to do a wee comparison of dplyr V SQL, so that folks, particularly those in the NHS who might be R curious, can see just what the fuss is about. To... [Read More]

AphA Scotland - it's a thing

Reflections on AphA Scotland launch event

Posted on May 13, 2018

On Tues 8th May there was only one Scottish based member of the Association of Professional Healthcare Analysts (me) but on Wed 9th May that number rose to around 80 with the launch of the the Scotland AphA Branch. The event took place in the very nice Perth Concert... [Read More]

backed by data

Minimising risk of delayed departure

Posted on April 2, 2018

This post is an attempt to answer this question: https://community.rstudio.com/t/how-to-answer-a-question-without-statistical-tests-but-is-backed-by-data/3711 It was a pretty interesting question, and I had an initial stab at providing an answer, but the charts I submitted were not the best looking, shall we say ( it was a late night rush job). So, I’m going... [Read More]

No strings attached

a faceting function with bare variable names in ggplot2

Posted on March 4, 2018

I’m working on a package of dplyr and ggplot2 functions that I can use on a day to day basis to plot data over time. I’ve done some basic experimenting with my preferred ggplot2 theme settings (highlandrthemes - it’s a thing), and the next stage is to get some commonly... [Read More]