Resources

Here are some data analytics and visualisation resources (courses, groups, books, data sets and more) I’ve used or plan to.

Algorithms

• Common machine learning examples, with R and Python
• Understanding Principal Component Analysis

Articles

• Want to Work With Data? Don’t Wait
• Getting Into Data Visualisation – Where Should I start?
• Data Science and R – How Do I Start?
• A Journey Into Data Science
• Another Journey Into Data Science
• Create Your Own Data Science Master’s
• Data Science Problems To Solve To Demonstrate Experience
• Advice For Applying To Data Science Jobs
• A Gentle Guide To The Grammar Of Graphics
• Learn Data Science With Python From Scratch
• Python Vs R Vs SAS
• Linear Regression With Example
• Civis Guide To Analytics Maturity
• Comparative Analysis of Top 6 Visualization Tools 2018
• How To Change Colour Of Specific Bars in Bar Chart In RStudio
• Finding The Right Colour Palette For Data Visualisations
• Visual Encoding – Michael Dubakov – basic principles of data visualisation

Blogs

• R-bloggers
• Mike Bostock – Creator of D3
• Junk Charts – data visualisation critic. First and most popular posts are:
  • First post – improving on a bar chart
  • Most popular post – Scatterplot Matrix
• Data visualisations in The Economist
• Storytelling with data
• Visual Cinnamon – data visualisation with R and D3
• Drawing with numbers – data visualisation with Tableau

Books

Stacked bar chart (made in Tableau Public) showing the topics covered in each of the data books on my book shelf:

• Confident Data Skills – Kirill Eremenko
• Doing Data Science – Cathy O’Neil & Rachel Schutt
• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information – Edward R. Tufte
• Interactive Data Visualization for the Web – An Introduction to Designing with D3 – Scott Murray
• R Cookbook – Proven Recipes for Data Analysis, Statistics and Graphics – Paul Teetor
• R Graphics Cookbook – Winston Chang
• R for Data Science – Import, Tidy, Transform, Visualize, and Model Data – Hadley Wickham, Garrett Grolemund
• Visualize This: The Flowingdata Guide to Design, Visualization and Statistics – Nathan Yau
• Data Visualisation – Andy Kirk
• Beautiful Data – Toby Segaran, Jeff Hammerbacher
• Beautiful Visualization – Julia Steele, Noah Iliinsky
• The Elements of Graphing Data – William Cleveland
• Visualizing Data – William Cleveland
• ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis (Use R!) – Hadley Wickham
• Storytelling with Data – A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals – Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic
• An Economist’s Guide To Visualising Data
• An Introduction to Statistical Learning
• Elements of Statistical Learning
• Numsense! Data Science For The Layman (No Math Added) – Annalyn Ng & Kenneth Soo
• Practical Statistics For Data Scientists – Peter Bruce

Cheat Sheets and Useful Diagrams

Data science process:

Source: Based on the diagram in the R For Data Science book.

Source images above can be found here.

Source

Also see the Rstudio Cheat Sheet.

Code

• Example Problems and Solutions
• Tutorials for Kaggle’s Titanic Challenge 
• Code from the “R For Data Science” book by Hadley Wickham and Garrett Grolemund
• Common machine learning examples, with R and Python
• How to Make Bubble Charts – Nathan Yau
• My GitHub repository – @foxnic
• Themes:
  • Custom Themes in ggplot2
  • Building a New Theme
  • ggthemes package
  • Theme Function In R
• Waffle chart code tweeted by @ybsamano

Courses

• DataCamp – Online courses in R, Shiny and more. Some courses are free.
• EDX Introduction to Data Science – Free course giving an overview of data science
• EDX Querying Data with Transact-SQL – Free course
• SuperDataScience – Online courses in Tableau and Excel – created by the author of “Confident Data Skills” (see “Books” section below)
• Online Data Science Course from Harvard University – includes statistics, algorithms, R and case studies
• Coursera – Data Science
• Coursera – Statistics With R
• Khan Academy – for maths courses
• RStudio Online Learning
• Stat545 Resources on Learning R

Free Data Sets

• Iris data set
• UK Food Diary Data
• UK Police data
• UK Grants (a ThreeSixtyGiving.org challenge)
• Kaggle
• Kaggle Data Scientist Survey Data

Groups

• Open Data Manchester – an association for people who are interested in realising the potential of data to benefit citizens, business and public bodies in Greater Manchester and beyond. It is a diverse community of developers, activists, artists, journalists and public sector employees.
• R Ladies Global – Network of women who program with R. Includes meet-ups and mentoring.
• HER+Data MCR – Meetup group in Manchester for women in data
• DataKind UK – charity with a mission to use data in the service of humanity
• Data For Democracy

Palettes

The 3 palettes above are from Colour lovers:

• Dance To Forget
• Satellite Of Love
• Neon Sunset

Tools

• Tableau Public – data visualisation tool that’s easy to use, even if you know nothing about programming. It’s used widely in the commercial world. Tableau Public is the free version. All your data will be public. You can pay for versions to keep your data private. Below is the 500 Women Scientists visualisation in the Tableau Public Gallery
• RStudio – Suite of tools for writing and running r code. There are 2 versions that are free – a desktop version and a version accessible from a browser
• ShinyApps.io – Shiny is a tool for building apps that let people choose data inputs and display outputs based on your r scripts. It’s a part of RStudio and you can get up to 25 active hours for free. Look at this gallery of examples of shiny apps to see how it can be used. A really simple example is the Kmeans example shiny app
• D3 – “a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. D3 helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG, and CSS.”

Image: Linked from the D3 website to a Guardian article about the presidential address 

Tutorials

• D3 tutorials – Scott Murray
• FlowingData Tutorials – Nathan Yau – tutorials on creating visualisations in R e.g. How to make unit charts with icon images in R

Videos

• Creating A Simple Bar Chart in RStudio
• Forecasting With Simple Linear Regression In Excel

Websites

• The Data Visualisation Catalogue – A catalogue of data visualisations with a description of each, including benefits and drawbacks.
• D3 Gallery of Charts
• Flowing Data’s Articles on Color
• Colour Lovers
• ColorHexa
• Coolors – A tool for finding great colour combinations
• Flat UI Colors – A collection of flat UI colour palettes
• Colourpicker For Data – Another useful tool for choosing colours for data visualisations
• Color Brewer 2 – A tool to help you choose a colour palette for data visualisations