How to learn R: A flow chart

I often find myself giving people suggestions about how to learn R, so I decided to put together a flow chart. This is geared toward typical psychology or cognitive science researchers planning to do basic data analysis in R. This is how to get started -- it won't make you an expert, but it should get you past your SPSS/Excel addiction. One day I'll expand it to include advanced topics.

My "Top 5 R Functions"

In preparation for a R Workgroup meeting, I started thinking about what would be my "Top 5 R Functions". I ruled out the functions for basic mechanics - save, load, mean, etc. - they're obviously critical, but every programming language has them, so there's nothing especially "R" about them. I also ruled out the fancy statistical analysis functions like (g)lmer -- most people (including me) start using R because they want to run those analyses so it seemed a little redundant. I started using R because I wanted to do growth curve analysis, so it seems like a weak endorsement to say that I like R because it can do growth curve analysis. No, I like R because it makes (many) somewhat complex data operations really, really easy. Understanding how take advantage of these R functions is what transformed my view of R from purely functional (I need to do analysis X and R has functions for doing analysis X) to an all-purpose tool that allows me to do data processing, management, analysis, and visualization extremely quickly and easily. So, here are the 5 functions that did that for me:

1. subset() for making subsets of data (natch)
2. merge() for combining data sets in a smart and easy way
3. melt() for converting from wide to long data formats
4. dcast() for converting from long to wide data formats, and for making summary tables
5. ddply() for doing split-apply-combine operations, which covers a huge swath of the most tricky data operations 

For anyone interested, I posted my R Workgroup notes on how to use these functions on RPubs. Side note: after a little configuration, I found it super easy to write these using knitr, "knit" them into a webpage, and post that page on RPubs.

Conspicuously missing from the above list is ggplot, which I think deserves a special lifetime achievement award for how it has transformed how I think about data exploration and data visualization. I'm planning that for the next R Workgroup meeting.

Why pursue a Ph.D.?

This video is directed at STEM fields, so I am not sure everything in it applies perfectly to cognitive neuroscience. But, if you're going to go to grad school, I think this is the right kind of perspective to bring:


Why Pursue A Ph.D.? Three Practical Reasons (12-minute video) from Philip Guo on Vimeo.

(via FlowingData)

Plotting mixed-effects model results with effects package

As separate by-subjects and by-items analyses have been replaced by mixed-effects models with crossed random effects of subjects and items, I've often found myself wondering about the best way to plot data. The simple-minded means and SE from trial-level data will be inaccurate because they won't take the nesting into account. If I compute subject means and plot those with by-subject SE, then I'm plotting something different from what I analyzed, which is not always terrible, but definitely not ideal. It seems intuitive that the condition means and SE's are computable from the model's parameter estimates, but that computation is not trivial, particularly when you're dealing with interactions. Or, rather, that computation was not trivial until I discovered the effects package.

Visualizing Components of Growth Curve Analysis

This is a guest post by Matthew Winn:

One of the more useful skills I’ve learned in the past couple years is growth curve analysis (GCA), which helps me analyze eye-tracking data and other kinds of data that take a functional form. Like some other advanced statistical techniques, it is a procedure that can be done without complete understanding, and is likely to demand more than one explanation before you really “get it”. In this post, I will illustrate the way that I think about it, in hopes that it can “click” for some more people. The objective is to break down a complex curve into individual components.

Flip the script, or, the joys of coord_flip()

Has this ever happened to you?

I hate it when the labels on the x-axis overlap, but this can be hard to avoid. I can stretch the figure out, but then the data become farther apart and the space where I want to put the figure (either in a talk or a paper) may not accommodate that. I've never liked turning the labels diagonally, so recently I've started using coord_flip() to switch the x- and y-axes:
ggplot(chickwts, aes(feed, weight)) + stat_summary(fun.data=mean_se, geom="pointrange") + coord_flip()

It took a little getting used to, but I think this works well. It's especially good for factor analyses (where you have many labeled items):
library(psych)
pc <- principal(Harman74.cor$cov, 4, rotate="varimax")
loadings <- as.data.frame(pc$loadings[, 1:ncol(pc$loadings)])
loadings$Test <- rownames(loadings)

ggplot(loadings, aes(Test, RC1)) + geom_bar() + coord_flip() + theme_bw(base_size=10)

It also works well if you want to plot parameter estimates from a regression model (where the parameter names can get long):
library(lme4)
m <- lmer(weight ~ Time * Diet + (Time | Chick), data=ChickWeight, REML=F)
coefs <- as.data.frame(coef(summary(m)))
colnames(coefs) <- c("Estimate", "SE", "tval")
coefs$Label <- rownames(coefs)


ggplot(coefs, aes(Label, Estimate)) + geom_pointrange(aes(ymin = Estimate - SE, ymax = Estimate + SE)) + geom_hline(yintercept=0) + coord_flip() + theme_bw(base_size=10)

Guidebook for growth curve analysis

I don't usually like to use complex statistical methods, but every once in a while I encounter a method that is so useful that I can't avoid using it. Around the time I started doing eye-tracking research (as a post-doc with Jim Magnuson), people were starting recognize the value of using longitudinal data analysis techniques to analyze fixation time course data. Jim was ahead of most in this regard (Magnuson et al., 2007) and a special issue of the Journal of Memory and Language on data analysis methods gave as a great opportunity to describe how to apply "Growth Curve Analysis" (GCA) - a type of multilevel regression - to fixation time course data (Mirman, Dixon, & Magnuson, 2008). Unbeknownst to us, Dale Barr was working on very similar methods, though for somewhat different reasons, and our articles ended up neighbors in the special issue (Barr, 2008).

In the several years since those papers came out, it has become clear to me that other researchers would like to use GCA, but reading our paper and downloading our code examples was often not enough for them to be able to apply GCA to their own data. There are excellent multilevel regression textbooks out there, but I think it is safe to say that it's a rare cognitive or behavioral scientist who has the time and inclination to work through a 600-page advanced regression textbook. It seemed like a more practical guidebook to implementing GCA was needed, so I wrote one and it has just been published by Chapman & Hall / CRC Press as part of their R Series.

My idea was to write a relatively easy-to-understand book that dealt with the practical issues of implementing GCA using R. I assumed basic knowledge of behavioral statistics (standard coursework in graduate behavioral science programs) and minimal familiarity with R, but no expertise in computer programming or the specific R packages required for implementation (primarily lme4 and ggplot2). In addition to the core issues of fitting growth curve models and interpreting the results, the book covers plotting time course data and model fits and analyzing individual differences. Example data sets and solutions to the exercises in the book are available on my GCA website.

Obviously, the main point of this book is to help other cognitive and behavioral scientists to use GCA, but I hope it will also encourage them to make better graphs and to analyze individual differences. I think individual differences are very important to cognitive science, but most statistical methods treat them as just noise, so maybe having better methods will lead to better science, though this might be a subject for a different post. Comments and feedback about the book are, of course, most welcome.