Live Earthquakes App

It's awesome when you are asked to build a product demo and you end up building something you actually use yourself.

That is what happened to me with the Live Earthquake Shiny App.  A few months ago, as part of the JHU Data Science Specialization course, I was tasked to build a data product demo using the shiny package in R. I'd already had some experience with shiny, but this time I wanted to build an app showing real-time data. Something people would like to monitor regularly and see if something special happened during the last couple of days.

I am not at all an expert on earthquakes, but I thought this would make a great use case for a real-time data visualization. And now, every time I hear from the news of a new earthquake episode I go to double check it in my app and see what else is going on.

The app does the following:

• Retrieve the latest version of data available from USGS website. Data comes in a .csv file and reports quakes for the past 7 days (check the exact URL in the R code).
• Subset the dataset in case the user chooses to see only data from yesterday.
• Plot earthquake data on a world map using the leaflet library.
• Calculate a few basic metrics like max and number of occurrences.
• Force a manual refresh of data if the user press the button “Update Data”.

Here is a snapshot of the app. You can use the app here in shinyapps.io server.

Also you check out the code here.

If you click on each circle some basic info about the quake are shown: place, time, magnitude and depth. Circles colors are based on the magnitude (the darker the stronger). If you wonder how I classified them from minor to strong below is the scale I used:

Hope you'll have a chance to explore it! Enjoy.

Playing with R, Shiny Dashboard and Google Analytics Data

In this post, I want to share some examples of data visualization I was playing with recently. Like in many other occasions, my field of application is digital analytics data. Precisely, data from Google Analytics.

You might remember a previous post where I built a tentative dashboard using R, Shiny and Google Charts. The final result was not too bad, however the layout was somewhat too rigid since I was using the command "merge" to merge the charts and create the final dashboard.

So, I thought to spend some time improving my previous dashboard and include a couple of new visualizations, which will be hopefully inspiring. Of course, I am still using R, Shiny, and in particular shinydashboard: an ad hoc package to build dashboard with R.

Google Analytics Dashboards with R & Shiny

One of the key activities of any web or digital analyst is to design and create dashboards. The main objective of a web analytics dashboard is to display the current status of your key web metrics and arrange them on a single view, so that information can be monitored at a glance. Great dashboards should allow you/your boss or client to take action quickly and spot trends in data.

There are plenty of tools for creating dashboard out there. You can decide to create your dashboard directly in Google Analytics, using a spreadsheets (e.g. Excel or Google Sheets) or you might decide to go for an ad hoc dashboarding solution such as Tableau, or Klipfolio (I am a heavy user of the latter).

In this blogpost I aim to move away a bit from traditional dashboarding tools, and I wil show you an example of Google Analytics dashboard I've built using the R programming language and the Shiny package. Finally, I will also summarize the main benefits of using such tools for creating dashboards and perform data analysis in a digital analytics context.

[UPDATE: I've recently built a more sophisticated and better looking dashboard using the shinydashboard package. Click here to see it.]

My first R Shiny Web Application using breast cancer data

I love the idea of making non-R users playing with my datasets. Thanks to R Shiny package this is is now possible and I am going to post here my code for a simple web application.

But first a few lines about Shiny package and my dataset. Okay…if you are in a hurry and want to go straight to check my app, here is the link http://spark.rstudio.com/marqui/breastcancer/

Shiny package

Shiny is a new package created by RStudio (http://www.rstudio.com/shiny/) that makes it very easy to build interactive web applications with R. Yes, that means that anyone can use it, interact with your data and gain insights from your analysis results.