Data

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been tracking the top 5 hot searches in India on Google Trends (http://www.google.co.in/trends). Here are the results: If you're interested in making visualisations out of it, please feel free. But there's one particular thing I'm trying out, which is to categorise these searches and see if there's a trend around that. I've added a "Tag" column. Could you please help me tag the spreadsheet: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Av599tR_jVYgdE5zTU5QWjcxVWVCaTBuY3d0NkUtc1E&hl=en_GB It’s publicly editable, no special access required. If you could stick to the tags I already have (Business, Education, Entertainment, News, Politics, Sports, Technology), that would be great. If not, that’s fine as well. And if you’ve made any visualisations or done any analysis using this data, please do drop a comment. ...

When writing Mixamail, I wanted tweets automatically shortened to 140 characters – but in the most readable manner. Some steps are obvious. Removing redundant spaces, for example. And URL shortening. I use bit.ly because it has an API. I’ll switch to Goo.gl, once theirs is out. I tried a few more strategies: Replace words with short forms. “u” for “you”, “&” for and, etc. Remove articles – a, an, the Remove optional punctuation – comma, semicolon, colon and quotes, in particular Replace “one” with “1”, “to” or “too” with 2, etc. “Before” becomes “Be4”, for example Remove spaces after punctuations. So “a, b” becomes “a,b” – the space after the comma is removed Remove vowels in the middle. nglsh s lgbl wtht vwls. How did they pan out? I tested out these on the English sentences on the Tanaka Corpus, which has about 150,000 sentences. (No, they’re not typical tweets, but hey…). By just doing these, independently, here is the percentage reduction in the size of text: ...

I’ve tried understanding Bayes’ Theorem several times. I’ve always managed to get confused. Specifically, I’ve always wondered why it’s better than simply using the average estimate from the past. So here’s a little attempt to jog my memory the next time I forget. Q: A coin shows 5 heads when tossed 10 times. What’s the probability of a heads? A: It’s not 0.5. That’s the most likely estimate. The probability distribution is actually: ...

I was browsing through Beautiful Data, and stumbled upon this gem of a visualisation. This is the default plot R provides when supplied with a table of data. A beautiful use of small multiples. Each box is a scatterplot of a pair of variables. The diagonal is used to label the rows. It shows for every pair of variables their correlation and spread – at a glance. Whenever I get any new piece of data, this is going to be the very first thing I do: ...