• Assignment 2 general feedback

• Assignment 3/Final Project

• Review

• Static results presentation

  • Automatic table creation

  • Plotting best practices

  • ggplot2 for general graphing

  • Zelig simulations for showing results

• Please see me in my office hours to help refine operationalisation, research question, etc.

• Proofread your work!

  • Finish your sentences!

  • Check output document to see if it has rendered correctly.

• A catchy and descriptive title is good to have!

• If you use HTML make sure you provide a link to a hosted and rendered version, e.g. on rawgit.

• Numbered section headings, in YAML header:

number_sections: true

Figure captions, in YAML header include:

fig_caption: true

Then, in knitr head include option:

fig.cap = "A Caption Example"

or in imported images:

![A Caption Example \label{LaTeXref}](some_image.png)

Can reference in knitr LaTeX with \ref{LaTeXRef}.

Purpose: Gather, clean, and analyse data

Deadline: 13 November 2015

You will submit a GitHub repo that:

• Gathers web-based data from at least two sources. Cleans and merges the data so that it is ready for statistical analyses.

• Conducts basic descriptive and inferential statistics with the data to address a relevant research question.

• Briefly describes the results including with dynamically generated tables and figures.

• Has a write up of 1,500 words maximum that describes the data gathering and analysis and uses literate programming.

Purposes: Pose an interesting research question and try to answer it using data analysis and standard academic practices. Effectively communicate your results to a variety of audiences in a variety of formats.

Deadline:

• Presentation: In-class Thursday 4 December

• Website/Paper: 11 December

The project can be thought of as a 'dry run' for your thesis with multiple presentation outputs.

Presentation: 10 minutes maximum. Engagingly present your research question and key findings to a general academic audience (fellow students).

Paper: 6,000 words maximum. Standard academic paper, properly cited laying out your research question, literature review, data, methods, and findings.

Website: An engaging website designed to convey your research to a general audience.

As always, you should submit one GitHub repository with all of the materials needed to completely reproduce your data gathering, analysis, and presentation documents.

Note: Because you've had two assignments already to work on parts of the project, I expect high quality work.

Find one other group to be a discussant for your presentation.

The discussants will provide a quick (max 2 minute) critique of your presentation–ideas for things you can improve on your paper.

I will have normal office hours (Friday 15:00-17:00, room 1.64) every week for the rest of the term, except 13 November.

Please take advantages of this opportunity to improve your final project.

• What is the basic R syntax for a regression model?

• What is a model function? What two parts do GLM model functions have?

• How do you find a 95% confidence interval for a parameter point estimate (both mathematically and in R)?

• What is one good way to interpret and present results from a logistic regression to both a statistical and general audience?

Today we will learn how to communicate your research findings with automatically generated tables and static plots.

Why automatically generate?

• Saves time: don't have to re-enter numbers by hand into a table or restyle a graph each time you change the data/analysis.

• Easier to find and correct errors: all source code that created all tables and figures is linked and output updated when corrections are made.

• More reproducible: everything is clearly linked together.

In general include the functions to create the tables/figures in a code chunk.

Include in the code chunk head echo=FALSE, warning=FALSE, error=FALSE, message=FALSE.

You may need to also include results='asis' for some table functions.

See previous weeks 4 and 5 for figure code chunk options.

There are a number of tools for automatically generating tables in R/R Markdown.

• kable in the knitr package

• xtable package

• texreg package

• stargazer package

We will focus on kable and stargazer.

• kable is a good, simple tool for creating tables from data frames (or matrices).

• stargazer is useful for creating more complex tables of regression model output.

Example Docs: HertieDataScience/Examples/PaperWithRegressionTables

Set up from Lecture 8:

# Load data
URL <- 'http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/data/binary.csv'
Admission <- read.csv(URL)

# Estimate model
Logit1 <- glm(admit ~ gre + gpa + as.factor(rank),
              data = Admission, family = 'binomial')

# Create fitted data
fitted <- with(Admission,
               data.frame(gre = mean(gre),
                          gpa = mean(gpa),
                          rank = factor(1:4)))

library(knitr)
fitted$predicted <- predict(Logit1, newdata = fitted,
                            type = 'response')
kable(fitted)

You can stylise the table.

kable(fitted, align = 'c', digits = 2,
      caption = 'Predicted Probabilities for Fitted Values')

Don't showing more digits to the right of the decimal than are statistically and substantively meaningful.

A rule of thumb: more than one or two digits are rarely meaningful.

See also: http://andrewgelman.com/2012/07/02/moving-beyond-hopeless-graphics/

kable is limited if we want to create regression output tables, especially for multiple models.

stargazer is good for this.

Estimate models

L1 <- glm(admit ~ gre,
              data = Admission, family = 'binomial')

L2 <- glm(admit ~ gre + gpa,
              data = Admission, family = 'binomial')

L3 <- glm(admit ~ gre + gpa + as.factor(rank),
              data = Admission, family = 'binomial')

When you are creating a table for an HTML doc with stargazer use:

• type = 'html'

# Create cleaner covariate labels
labels <- c('GRE Score', 'GPA Score',
            '2nd Ranked School', '3rd Ranked School',
            '4th Ranked School', '(Intercept)')

stargazer::stargazer(L1, L2, L3, covariate.labels = labels,
    title = 'Logistic Regression Estimates of Grad School Acceptance',
    digits = 2, type = 'html')

When you are creating a PDF use the arguments:

• type = 'latex'

• header = FALSE

# Create cleaner covariate labels
labels <- c('GRE Score', 'GPA Score',
            '2nd Ranked School', '3rd Ranked School',
            '4th Ranked School', '(Intercept)')

stargazer::stargazer(L1, L2, L3, covariate.labels = labels,
    title = 'Logistic Regression Estimates of Grad School Acceptance',
    digits = 2, type = 'latex', header = FALSE)

Tables are important to include so that readers can explore details, but are usually not the best way to show your results.

Figures are often more effective.

(A Selection of) Tufte's Principles for Excellent Statistical Graphics (2001, 13):

• Show the data

• Encourage the eye to compare differences in the data

• Serve a clear purpose

• Avoid distorting the data

• Be closely integrated with the text

Show the data, not other things like silly graphics or unnecessary words.

Have a high data ink ratio:

\[ \mathrm{Data\:Ink\:Ratio} = \mathrm{\frac{data - ink}{total\:ink}} \]

How did the budgets change? (Orange is 2013, Blue is 2012)

In general: Avoid using the size of a circle to mean something!

So, avoid:

• bubble charts

• pie charts

Circles can distort data.

• It is difficult to compare their size.

• The Ebbinghause Illusion!

Order the circles from smallest to largest.

The circles are on a scale of 0-100, so what are their values?

Which circle is bigger?

Which square is darkest?

Only give graphical features (e.g. bars in a bar chart) different colours if it means something in the data.

Colours should be used to:

• highlight particular data,

• group items,

• encode quantitative values

  • Values of continuous variables should be represented using increasing hues of the same colour.

  • Categorical variables should be represented with different colours. (rule of thumb: avoid using more than about 7 colours in a plot)

Color Blindness

People who are colour blind can have difficulty distinguishing between red-green and blue-yellow.

About 5-8% of men are colour blind.

We need to choose colour schemes for our graphics that are colour blind friendly.

For more information see http://www.usability.gov/get-involved/blog/2010/02/color-blindness.html.

Color Brewer is a great resource for selecting colours: http://colorbrewer2.org/.

"gg" means "Grammar of Graphics".

"2" just means that it is the second one.

Each plot is made of layers. Layers include the coordinate system (x-y), points, labels, etc.

Each layer has aesthetics (aes) including the x & y, size, shape, and colour.

The main layer types are called geometrics (geom). These include lines, points, density plots, bars, and text.

library(devtools)
library(ggplot2)

source_url("http://bit.ly/OTWEGS")

# Create data with no missing values of infant mortality
InfantNoMiss <- subset(MortalityGDP,
                           !is.na(InfantMortality))

# Create High/Low Income Variable
InfantNoMiss$DumMort[InfantNoMiss$InfantMortality
                     >= 15] <- "high"
InfantNoMiss$DumMort[InfantNoMiss$InfantMortality
                     < 15] <- "low"

ggplot(data = MortalityGDP, aes(x = InfantMortality,
        y = GDPperCapita)) + geom_point()

ggplot(data = MortalityGDP, aes(x = InfantMortality,
        y = GDPperCapita)) + geom_point() + theme_bw(base_size = 13)

There are a number of ways to specify colours in ggplot2.

The simplest way is to let ggplot choose the colours for you.

ggplot(data = InfantNoMiss, aes(log(InfantMortality),
                                log(GDPperCapita))) +
      geom_point(aes(colour = income)) +
      theme_bw()

There are many ways to pick specific colors.

In this class we will mainly use hexadecimal colours.

This is probably the most commonly used system for choosing colours on the web.

Every colour is given six digits.

A good website for getting hexadecimal colour schemes is: http://colorbrewer2.org/.

# Create colour vector
Colours <- c("#1B9E77", "#D95F02", "#7570B3",
             "#E7298A", "#66A61E", "#E6AB02")

# Create graph
ggplot(data = InfantNoMiss,
                    aes(log(InfantMortality),
                        log(GDPperCapita))) +
        geom_point(aes(colour = income)) +
        scale_color_manual(values = Colours) +
        xlab("\nLog Infant Mortality") +
        ylab("Log GDP/Capita\n") +
        ggtitle("Log Transformed Data\n") +
        theme_bw()

# Create a violin Plot
ggplot(InfantNoMiss, aes(factor(DumMort),
                        log(GDPperCapita))) +
          geom_violin(fill = "#E7298A",
                      colour = "#E7298A",
                      alpha = I(0.5)) +
          geom_jitter(color = "#7570B3") +
          xlab("\n Infant Mortality") +
          ylab("Log GDP Per Capital\n") +
          theme_bw(base_size = 16)

King, Tomz, and Wittenberg (2001) argue that post estimation simulations can be used to effectively communicate results from regression models.

1. Estimate our parameters' point estimates for \(\hat{\beta}_{1\ldots k}\).

2. Draw \(n\) values of the point estimates from multivariate normal distributions with means \(\bar{\beta}_{1\ldots k}\) and variances specified by the parameters' estimated co-variance.

3. Use the simulated values to calculate quantities of interest (e.g. predicted probabilities).

4. Plot the simulated distribution using visual weighting.

Post-estimation simulations allow us to effectively communicate our estimates and the uncertainty around them.

This method is broadly similar to a fully Bayesian approach with Markov-Chain Monte Carlo or bootstrapping. Just differ on how the parameters are drawn.

It is relatively easy to find the coefficient estimates from an estimated model with coef.

You can find the co-variance matrix with vcov.

Then draw the values from the multivariate normal distribution with mvrnorm.

Finally, calculate the quantity of interest with the draws + fitted values using and plot the results.

The Zelig package streamlines this process.

First estimate your regression model using zelig.

library(Zelig)

# Have to explicitly declare rank as factor
Admission$rank <- as.factor(Admission$rank)

Z1 <- zelig(admit ~ gre + gpa + rank, cite = FALSE,
              data = Admission, model = 'logit')

Then set the fitted values with setx.

setZ1 <- setx(Z1, gre = 220:800)

And run the simulations (1,000 by default) with sim.

simZ1 <- sim(Z1, x = setZ1)

Plot:

plot(simZ1)

Create tables and visualisations of descriptive and inferential for your Assignment 3 using the techniques covered in class today.

If you don't have your data set fully cleaned yet, use one of the built-in R data sets for practice.