My studies involve a lot of data organized in space and across time. I look at housing data that usually captures activity around the United States, or sometimes the world, and almost always over time. In my data visualization explorations I like to study different ways to visualize trends across both space and time, often simultaneously. Let’s consider a couple here in this post. Per usual we will make our graphics with R.
I saw this fun bit of R code in a tweet by user aschinchon. df <- data.frame(x=0, y=0) for (i in 2:500) { df[i,1] <- df[i-1,1]+((0.98)^i)*cos(i) df[i,2] <- df[i-1,2]+((0.98)^i)*sin(i) } ggplot2::ggplot(df, aes(x,y)) + geom_polygon()+ theme_void()#rstats pic.twitter.com/cgNjyk405f — Antonio S. Chinchón (@aschinchon) August 16, 2018 Let’s remix it to make a fun animation. We’ll zoom in and out and have the colors shift. Click for R code
About a year ago I shared code for a dataviz with a progress bar. Let’s update that R code using gifski and tweener. The code below will generate this animated gif: Gif code. Click for details. # CPI VIz with progress bar---- # set up your directory mydir <- "PATH_TO_YOUR_DIRECTORY" # libraries ---- library(data.table) library(tidyverse) library(tweenr) library(gifski) library(ggridges) library(extrafont) library(scales) library(cowplot) # make plots ---- # Get data----- # CPILFESL is FRED mnemonic for CPI: All Items Less Food and Energy # https://fred.
Today was JOLTS Tuesday, when the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics releases updated data from the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. I was talking about it earlier today, but before we get into that… If you care about dataviz check this out I saw this on Twitter today via Jon Schwabish. Link to a handy dataviz cheatsheet outlining Jon’s core dataviz principles. Prints out nicely on pdf. Back to the JOLTS.
Maybe you are of the opinion that charts should have their y axis extend all the way down to 0, even if the data live far away from zero. I’m not sure if that’s always the right thing to do. But if you are strict about this, how can you use the space? One thing I experimented with in my Mortgage rates in the 21st century post was filling the area under a line with progressively fainter area.
In this post I want to share updated plots comparing house price trends around the world. Or at least part of the world. Our view will be somewhat limited, based on data, but will at least allow us to see how U.S. house prices compare to a few other countries. The details behind these plots are explained in more detail in this post, but some of the images were lost due to my blog transition.
This tweet turned out to be popular: 👀house price trends👀 pic.twitter.com/JXB5P0H84A — Leonard Kiefer (@lenkiefer) August 1, 2018 It’s a remix of a chart we made here, though it uses a different index. In the earlier post, we used the FHFA house price index, but this one used the Case-Shiller Index, which was released today. Let me just post two gifs and then below will be the R code I used to create them.
Let’s pick up where we left off yesterday and do some more exploration with text mining. Like yesterday we’ll use the tidytext package for R. And we’ll lean heavily on Julie Silge and David Robinson’s Text Mining with R. Data We’ll turn again to the Federal Reserve for our text data. But today we’ll explore the Beige Book, which gathers anecdotal information on current economic conditions across the Federal Reserve Districts.
Textmining is an exciting topic. There is tremendous potential to gain insights from textual analysis. See for example Gentzko, Kelly and Taddy’s Text as Data. While text mining may be quite advanced in other fields, in finance and economics the application of these techniques is still in its infancy. In order to take advantage of text as data, economists and financial analysts need tools to help them. Fortunately, there is a great resource: Text Mining with R by Julia Silge (blog and on Twitter atjuliasilge) and David Robinson (blog and on Twitter atdrob).
Indications are that U.S. housing market activity in the middle part of 2018 has moderated. Home sales estimates for both new home sales and existing home sales declined on a seasonally adjusted basis in June relative to May. House price growth has also moderated recently. Some folks have gotten animated about the recent trends. I’m more sanguine about the recent data. Certainly a slowdown in housing market activity would be cause for concern.