With the Super Bowl only hours away now is your last chance to buy your boxes. Assuming the last digits are not assigned randomly you can maximize your chances with a little analysis. While I’ve seen plenty of sites giving the raw numbers, I thought a little visualization was in order.
In the graph above (made using ggplot2 in R, of course) the bigger squares represent greater frequency. The axes are labelled “Home” and “Away” for orientation, but in the Super Bowl that probably doesn’t matter too much, especially considering that Indianapolis is (Peyton) Manning territory so the locals will most likely be rooting for the Giants. Further, I believe Super Bowl XLII, featuring the same two teams, had a disproportionate number of Giants fans. Bias disclaimer: GO BIG BLUE!!!
Below is the same graph broken down by year to see how the distribution has changed over the past 20 years.
All the data was scraped from Pro Football Reference. All of my code and other graphs that didn’t make the cut are at my github site.
Fig. 1: This graph shows received and sent text messages by month. Notice the spike in July 2010.
A few weeks ago my iPhone for some reason erased ALL of my previous text messages (SMS and MMS) and it was as if I was starting with a new phone. After doing some digging I discovered that each time you sync your iPhone a copy of its text message database is saved on your computer which can be accessed without jailbreaking.
My original intent was to take the old database and union it with the new database for all the texting I had done since then, thus restoring all of my text messages. But once I got into the SQLite database I realized that I had a ton of information on my hands that was begging to be analyzed. It also didn’t hurt that I was in a lovely but small Vermont town for the week without much else to do at night.
My first finding, as seen above, is that my text messaging spiked after my girlfriend and I broke up around July of last year. Notice that for both years there is a dip in December. That’s because in 2009 I was in Burma during December and for 2010 the data stopped on December 6th when the last backup was made. A simple t-test confirmed that my texting did indeed increase after the breakup.
Fig. 2: This graph shows my text messaging pattern over time for both men and women. Notice the crossover around August 2010.
More interestingly, is that before my girlfriend and I broke up last year I texted more men than women, but shortly after we broke up that flipped. I don’t think that needs much of an explanation. The above graph and further analysis excludes her and family members because they would bias the gender effect. Being a good statistician I ran a poisson regression to see if there really was a significant change. The coefficient plot below (which is on the logarithmic scale) shows that my texting with males increased after the breakup (or Epoch) by 74% (calculated by summing the coefficients for “Epoch”, “Male” and “Male:Epoch” and then exponentiating) while my texting with females increased 127%.
Fig. 3: Here the “Male” coefficient seems statistically insignificant but its direction makes sense so it is left in the model. The “Intercept” is interpreted as the texting rate with females before the breakup, “Epoch” is the increase with females after the breakup, “Intercept” plus “Male” is the rate with males before the breakup. “Epoch” combined with “Male:Epoch” is the change in rate for texts with males after the breakup.
A great way to visualize the results of a regression is to use a Coefficient Plot like the one to the right. I’ve seen people on Twitter asking how to build this and there has been an option available using Andy Gelman’scoefplot() in the arm package. Not knowing this I built my own (as seen in this post about taste testing tomatoes) and they both suffered the same problems:. Long coefficient names often got cut off by the left margin of the graph and the name of the variable was appended to all the levels of a factor. One big difference between his and mine is that his does not include the Intercept by default. Mine includes the intercept with the option of excluding it.
I managed to solve the latter problem pretty quickly using some regularexpressions. Now the levels of factors are displayed alone, without being prepended by the factor name. As for the former, I fixed that yesterday by taking advantage of ggplot by Hadley Wickham which deals with the margins better than I do.
Both of these changes made for a vast improvement over what I had avialable before. Future improvements will address the sorting of the coefficients displayed and allow users to choose their own display names for the coefficients.
The function is in this file and is called plotCoef() and is very customizable, down to the color and line thickness. I kept my old version, plotCoefBase(), in the file in case some people are adverse to using ggplot, though no one should be. I sent the code to Dr. Gelman to hopefully be incorporated into his function which I’m sure gets used by a lot more people than mine will. Examples of my old version and of Dr. Gelman’s are after the break.
As always, any comments or questions are welcomed. Go to the Contact page or send an email to contact -at- jaredlander -dot- com or find me on Twitter @jaredlander. Continue reading →
Last week Slice ran a post about a tomato taste test they conducted with Scott Wiener (of Scott’s NYC Pizza Tours), Brooks Jones, Jason Feirman, Nick Sherman and Roberto Caporuscio from Keste. While the methods used may not be rigorous enough for definitive results, I took the summary data that was in the post and performed some simple analyses.
The first thing to note is that there are only 16 data points, so multiple regression is not an option. We can all thank the Curse of Dimensionality for that. So I stuck to simpler methods and visualizations. If I can get the raw data from Slice, I can get a little more advanced.
For the sake of simplicity I removed the tomatoes from Eataly because their price was such an outlier that it made visualizing the data difficult. As usual, most of the graphics were made using ggplot2 by Hadley Wickham. The coefficient plots were made using a little function I wrote. Here is the code. Any suggestions for improvement are greatly appreciated, especially if you can help with increasing the left hand margin of the plot. And as always, all the work was done in R.
The most obvious relationship we want to test is Overall Quality vs. Price. As can be seen from the scatterplot below with a fitted loess curve, there is not a linear relationship between price and quality.
Drew Conway has a piece on his Zero Intelligence Agents blog about how well informed Tea Party protesters are about tax policy. His analysis is pretty technical and he even offers up the R code he used to analyze the data and build the graphs which were made with a package called ggplot2 by Hadley Wickham at Rice University.
