Page Not Found
Page not found. Your pixels are in another canvas.
Sitemap
A list of all the posts and pages found on the site. For you robots out there is an XML version available for digesting as well.
Pages
About me
About me
Posts
Preparing for and passing BCS Foundation Certificate in Business Analysis (v4)
Published:
Last week I passed the BCS Business Analysis Foundation exam. Preparation took me about a week, with a good deal of cramming over one weekend — though I'd already covered a lot of the material on an earlier project management... Read more
PostcodesioR 0.1.1 is on CRAN
Published:
Introduction The latest stable version of my UK geocoder package has finally made it to CRAN . PostcodesioR is a wrapper for postcodes.io and it provides multiple functions to work with UK geospatial data. The package draws exclusively on open... Read more
Extracting pitch track from audio files into a data frame
Published:
My task was to extract pitch values from a long list of audio files. Previously I'd used Praat and R for this, but looping in R was rather slow, so I went looking for another approach. I developed the following... Read more
Automatic splitting of audio files on silence in Python
Published:
In my previous post , I described how to split audio files into chunks in R. This time I wanted to use Python to prepare long audio files (. mp3 ) for further analysis. The typical use case is splitting... Read more
Book Review - Sound Analysis and Synthesis with R
Published:
R might not be the most obvious choice for analysing audio data, but a growing number of packages now make it possible to analyse and synthesise sound. One of them is seewave, and Jérôme Sueur , one of its authors,... Read more
Spectrograms in R - a gallery
Published:
Creating a spectrogram is a basic step in almost any analysis of audio signals — it shows how the frequencies in a sound change over time. Happily, R has a good few packages for the job, and here I’ll run... Read more
Removing triggers from Hitachi ETG-4000 fNIRS recordings
Published:
HOMER2 expects a particular .nirs format that can’t contain consecutive triggers (also called Marks in Hitachi files). The hitachi2nirs MATLAB script does strip the markers, but I wanted to recreate the whole process myself and be sure I was doing... Read more
Geofacet Polski - wykresy w miejscu województw
Published:
Niedawno odnalazłem ciekawy pakiet geofacet , który umożliwia rozmieszczenie wykresów zgodnie z ich pozycją na mapie. Główna funkcja facet_geo() zastępuje facet_wrap() z ggplot2. Polska mapa jeszcze nie jest dostępna w standardowym pakiecie geofacet, ale mam nadzieję, że już wkrótce tam... Read more
Downloading UK property prices from Zoopla in R
Published:
Zoopla offers limited access to its API , which serves up the latest property prices and area indices. I wrote an R package for querying it — see the GitHub documentation or zooplaR’s page for the latest. Read more
Enabling MATLAB in Jupyter notebooks on Linux
Published:
Introduction Read more
Using MATLAB in Jupyter notebooks on Windows
Published:
After a while of using R notebooks, I found working with MATLAB in its IDE really unintuitive. I’d read that you can run MATLAB from IPython, but the instructions seemed a bit dated, and following them still didn’t get MATLAB... Read more
How to add code coverage (codecov) to your R package?
Published:
While developing another R package, I lost a bit of time working out how to add code coverage to it. I’d had the same trouble the time before, so this time I decided to write up the procedure step by... Read more
Interactive plot of fNIRS data
Published:
The quickest way to plot ETG-4000 data in R is plot_ETG4000() from the fnirsr package. But if you want to explore your data in more detail, an interactive plot works better. Read more
fnirsr - Fixing bugs, Travis CI, and detrending
Published:
I hadn’t touched fnirsr (my R package for analysing fNIRS data) in a while, so I decided it was time for some improvements. I read a great introduction to Travis CI and was determined to get it working this time.... Read more
Preview of a scientific notebook in fnirsr
Published:
Here’s a quick demonstration of the notebook that ships with the fnirsr package: Read more
Sending serial triggers from PsychoPy to ETG-4000 fNIRS
Published:
While designing my latest experiment in PsychoPy , I realised that setting up the serial port connection is far from obvious. I wrote this tutorial so that others — and future me — don’t have to waste time reinventing the... Read more
fnirsr - An R package to analyse ETG-4000 fNIRS data
Published:
As I mentioned in my previous post , I’m getting to grips with analysing fNIRS data collected on a Hitachi ETG-4000. A recording session can be saved as a raw CSV file (here’s an example ), and it’s fairly straightforward... Read more
Loading and plotting nirs data in R
Published:
I’ve recently been learning to use the Hitachi ETG-4000 for functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) in my research. I quickly discovered that, as so often in neuroscience, the main analysis packages are written in MATLAB. I couldn’t find any R code... Read more
Scraping the Performance History at the Royal Opera House
Published:
As a fan of both open data and the Royal Opera House (ROH), I was excited to find an article promising that the ROH’s data might be opened up. That article was from 2014, though, and the only open ROH... Read more
UK broadband speeds - embedding Tableau dashboards into Rmd files
Published:
I found a new dataset on UK broadband speeds and started analysing it in R. Once the data was cleaned, though, building a dashboard in Shiny looked like it would take too long, so I switched to Tableau. To keep... Read more
Postcode and Geolocation API for the UK
Published:
When I work with UK geographical data, I often need to extract geolocation information for postcodes. A handy way to do this in R is the geocode function from the ggmap package, which returns latitude and longitude via the Google... Read more
Brexit referendum and the housing market
Published:
One of my recent tasks at work was to analyse the Brexit referendum results alongside the UK housing market.Happily, everything except the rental data (which came from Zoopla) was publicly available. The property and rental prices took some wrangling, because... Read more
Interactive radar chart in R - Another EDA
Published:
Kaggle released a new dataset that looked perfect for trying out the interactive visualisations from the qtlcharts , ggvis , and radarchart packages. Read more
Pupils by first language in London boroughs (2015)
Published:
A while ago I discovered the London Datastore , a government data repository with a wide range of interesting datasets. One that caught my eye breaks down England’s school population by first language. As a non-native English speaker myself, I... Read more
Analysis of Lending Club’s loan book
Published:
Kaggle released another interesting dataset, this time the loan book of a peer-to-peer lender, Lending Club. Read more
My first Kaggle competition
Published:
Last month I entered my first Kaggle competition , working with BNP Paribas Cardif’s data. The official aim was to speed up the claims management process; my own goal was simply to put some machine learning techniques into practice. That... Read more
Residential property sales in England and Wales
Published:
One of my work projects that gained a lot of publicity was an analysis of residential property sales in England and Wales. The underlying data is collected by the Land Registry and is publicly available. Read more
Using ESRI shapefiles to create maps in R
Published:
R has plenty of plotting libraries, and you can combine them with open GIS data to build custom maps. In this post I’ll walk through a few. Read more
Center for World University Rankings - Kaggle dataset
Published:
Kaggle publishes plenty of interesting datasets, and one of them brings together several world university rankings . I thought I’d run a quick analysis of the CWUR data and map it in R with the rworldmap package. Read more
Read from txt file in Praat - “File not recognized” error
Published:
Praat is a great tool for analysing speech data, but I recently ran into a frustrating problem. Whenever I tried to open a txt file (a vector of numbers) in Praat, I’d get this error: File not recognized. File not... Read more
Analysing US Higher Education - Fees, admission rates, and SAT
Published:
I finally found some time to crunch the numbers from a Kaggle swag competition . The dataset was rather large, but I wanted to focus on the most recent figures (from 2013), so I only analysed MERGED2013_PP.csv . I started... Read more
Polling data for 2015 Polish parliamentary election
Published:
I’m back to analysing political data, having found a nicely formatted dataset on one of my favourite blogs . The post that got me started asked whether you can predict election results from polls and online popularity data. The short... Read more
Using R to query Google Trends and Ngrams
Published:
Lately I’ve been toying with the idea of comparing how popular different people and ideas are. I’ve already queried Wikipedia page views in R, but I wondered whether I could do something similar with Google Trends or Google Ngrams .... Read more
The Migrants’ Files - Counting the dead
Published:
I recently came across an interesting data journalism project called The Migrants’ Files , which collects and analyses information about migration. The data on dead and missing would-be migrants was publicly available, so I built a dashboard in Tableau using... Read more
Configuring Tableau Web Data Connectors on Windows 10 - using Google Sheets
Published:
Tableau Desktop 9.1 is out, and it introduces Web Data Connectors as a new type of data source. Handily, Tableau shipped a few working connectors to popular web data sources, and Google Sheets is one of them. I tried connecting... Read more
Analysing Quandl FX data in R - plotting, decomposing time series, and detecting anomalies
Published:
Quandl is a great source of all sorts of data, and it plugs straight into R . I wanted to have a play with some of it and see what insights I could tease out. Read more
Article Processing Charges paid by UCL (2013-2014)
Published:
I found an interesting dataset on Figshare showing how much University College London spent on Article Processing Charges (APCs). Its description says it should cover 1 April 2013 to 31 July 2014, but a few entries fall outside that window,... Read more
Research Councils UK Diversity Data
Published:
I recently came across a dataset published by Research Councils UK (RCUK) on the diversity of grant applicants. The report didn’t include a single plot, so I thought I’d fix that. Annoyingly, it was only available as a PDF, which... Read more
Higher Education Salaries in the UK
Published:
Times Higher Education published its 2015 pay survey back in April, but I’ve only just found time to turn the data into some interactive visualisations. Read more
Speech SENCOs in England
Published:
The Department for Education regularly publishes a list of educational establishments in England and Wales. I wanted to see which areas have the most schools with Speech Special Educational Needs Coordinators (SENCOs), and what those schools look like. To find... Read more
Mapping Post Codes in Poland using Tableau
Published:
Tableau 9.0 doesn’t include Polish post codes (yet?), so I built a map to show them myself. Read more
Automatic pitch extraction from speech recordings
Published:
I needed to extract mean pitch values from recordings of human speech, and I wanted to automate the job so I could rerun my analyses easily. So I wrote a couple of scripts to do it much faster. Read more
Butterworth Filter Demo in Shiny
Published:
I use EEGLAB to process my electroencephalographic data (that is, the brain’s electrical activity), but I wanted an interactive visualisation to show how different filter settings change the signal. I prefer R to MATLAB, so I built a Shiny app... Read more
Foreign crime victims in Poland
Published:
I recently read an article (in Polish) about the Polish police massaging their statistics. It made me wonder what data they publish on their website, and whether any interesting patterns might turn up. Read more
Popularity of UK political parties on Wikipedia
Published:
With the 2015 General Election on the way, I thought I’d compare how popular the main UK political parties are on Wikipedia. Read more
Scientific Retractions
Published:
After reading the paper by Steen et al. (2013) , I decided to have a play with the data published alongside it. Such an interesting topic deserved interactive plots, so I built some in Tableau. Read more
portfolio
publications
The language of rules: textual complexity in banking reforms
Published in Bank of England Staff Working Paper, 2019
This paper is about measuring complexity of banking regulations. We use multiple measures and show how complexity increased following the post-2007 reforms.
Recommended citation: Amadxarif, Z., Brookes, J., Garbarino, N., Patel, R., Walczak, E. (2019). The language of rules: textual complexity in banking reforms. Bank of England Staff Working Paper No. 834. https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/working-paper/2019/the-language-of-rules-textual-complexity-in-banking-reforms.pdf
Enhancing central bank communications using simple and relatable information
Published in Journal of Monetary Economics, 2019
We conducted large online experiments with representative samples of the UK population showing how simple and relatable information can make central banks’ communication easier to understand.
Recommended citation: Bholat, D., Broughton, N., Ter Meer, J., Walczak, E. (2019). Enhancing central bank communications using simple and relatable information. Journal of Monetary Economics, 108, 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmoneco.2019.08.007
Impacts of the Covid-19 crisis: Evidence from 2 million UK SMEs
Published in Bank of England Working Paper, 2021
This paper analyses cash flows of all UK SMEs during the Covid-19 crisis.
Recommended citation: Hurley, J., Karmakar, S., Markoska, E., Walczak, E., Walker, D. (2021). Impacts of the Covid-19 crisis: evidence from 2 million UK SMEs. Bank of England Staff Working Paper No. 924. https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/working-paper/2021/impacts-of-the-covid-19-crisis-evidence-from-2-million-uk-smes.pdf