My favorite pizza dough

Because lately I have been writing too often about serious stuff, today I will share the result of another type of experiments: the recipe of my favorite pizza dough. I have been experimenting making my own pizza dough for the last three years and I believe I have now found a recipe which yields a good result. The recipe distills and combines the wisdom of three very positive influences, Dan Leppard, Emmanuel Hadjiandreou, and il cucchiaio d’argento.

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Streamgraph in R [final]

This post is an update on the previous post translating Byron and Wattenberg’s streamgraphs algorithm into R. Byron and Wattenberg’s algorithm produces beautiful streamgraphs with the synthetic data produced by their streams generator. However, the implementation yields an ugly streamgraph when applied to data which might not be as wiggly as the synthetic ones. In the attempts I made I got very peaky wiggles, not smoothed and irregular. In short the graphs did not transmit the idea of a stream, but of a blurry blob or a peaky primitive bat (the wooden club, not the animal, that would be cool!). In this post I bring-up some points to bear in mind when producing a streamgraph.

Streamgraphs in base::R [e.III]

This is the third post on streamgraph in R. After a simple introduction on how to generate a streamgraphs and an example with actual data it was time for a more general implementation to the creation streamgraphs using R.

Multiple mediation: extracting output

Lavaan’s output is copious. Especially when fitting a complex model, lavaan’s output is literally a mine of information. Finding what is relevant is not always easy, therefore I will try to describe a way to summarize lavaan’s summary output.

Plotting multiple mediation

This posts on multiple mediation on lavaan supplements the two previous ones (1 – introducing multiple mediator analysis with lavaan and 2 – showing an example analysis) by describing how to process lavaan’s output graphically. I discovered the handy package semPlot and I am very positive about it. I will make the example as reproducible as possible, so that each step can be repeated. Also, I am going to try to provide more explanation about the R commands I used because a friend pointed out that the description of the steps was sometimes a bit dry and abstract.

Multiple-mediation example with lavaan

This post extends this previous one on multiple-mediation with lavaan. Here I modeled a ‘real’ dataset instead of a randomly generated one. This dataset we used previously for a paper published some time ago. There we investigated whether fear of an imperfect fat self was a stronger mediator than hope of a perfect thin self on dietary restraint in college women. At the time of the paper’s publication we performed the analysis using the SPSS macro INDIRECT . However,

Multiple-mediator analysis with lavaan

I wrote this brief introductory post for my friend Simon. I want to show how easy the transition from SPSS to R can be. In the specific case of mediation analysis the transition to R can be very smooth because, thanks to lavaan, the R knowledge required to use the package is minimal. Analysis of mediator effects in lavaan requires only the specification of the model, all the other processes are automated by the package. So, after reading in the data, running the test is trivial.

Four dimensions in two dimensions

This scatterplot is one of the best data visualisation I made. I like it because it concentrates a lot of information into a single visualisation. The scatterplot displays four dimensional data (i.e., four variables) using a two dimensional scatterplot. I made the first implementation in R, but because I wanted to add interactivity I switched to d3.js. Below I describe the choices I made to display the information and how I coded them in d3.js.

Streamgraphs in base::R [e.II]

Until recently I did not have a practical application in which to use streamgraphs. In fact, I still find the visualisation complex to understand, abstract and a bit too artistic. While I recognise that the strength of streamgraphs is the display of all the time series’ values into one (possibly interactive) plot, the amount of data displayed is massive, with many streams and even more data points. Because of the amount of data displayed

Streamgraphs in base::R [e.I]

This is the first of a series of four post on producing a streamgraph in plain R code. Here I present a very simple R script plotting a streamgraph. In this post I made streamgraph in d3.js, but I wanted to be able to do the same in R, to not depend on a webpage, or without requiring additional libraries (e.g. the streamgraph htmlwidgtet is only a wrapper around d3, and does not work always smoothly).