Tessera Tutorial at useR! 2015

Links for the Tutorial

• Slides
• Housing example code (note that you can equivalently use the code in the slides)
• Taxi example code and link to rate code information

Download Tutorial Materials

To avoid network issues at the tutorial and to help get things started off smoothly, please download the required packages and data sets listed below prior to the tutorial. Additional materials such as slides and example code will be made available at the time of the tutorial.

1. If you do not already have the most recent version of R, (version 3.2), please download and install it.

2. You will need a recent version of the Firefox or Chrome browser installed on your computer.

3. Open R and execute the following commands to install Tessera and other libraries you’ll need for the tutorials:

install.packages(c("maps", "ggplot2", "gridExtra", "lubridate", "geosphere", "devtools"))
devtools::install_github("tesseradata/datadr")
devtools::install_github("tesseradata/trelliscope")
devtools::install_github("hafen/housingData")
devtools::install_github("bokeh/rbokeh")

Update: it appears there may be some issues with github rate limiting at the conference. If you try the above install_github commands and get an error to the effect of “(403) Forbidden”, we have made the github packages available at another location:

# only run this if the install commands above were not successful
install.packages(c("maps", "ggplot2", "gridExtra", "lubridate", "geosphere", "devtools"))

packages <- c("datadr_0.7.5.8", "housingData_0.2", "rbokeh_0.2.3.1", "trelliscope_0.8.4")
urls <- sprintf("http://ml.stat.purdue.edu/user2015/packages/%s.tar.gz", packages)

devtools::install_url(urls)

For Windows users: when installing devtools, you may notice the following warning, which you can ignore:

> library(devtools)
WARNING: Rtools is required to build R packages, but no version of Rtools compatible with R 3.x was found. (Only the following incompatible version(s) of Rtools were found:3.2)
Please download and install Rtools 3.1 from http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools/ and then run find_rtools().

To test your installation, you can load R and try the following commands:

library(trelliscope)
library(rbokeh)
library(housingData)

panel <- function(x)
  figure() %>% ly_points(time, medListPriceSqft, data = x)

housing %>%
  qtrellis(by = c("county", "state"), panel, layout = c(2, 4))

This should bring up an interactive trelliscope display in your web browser.

4. Download the NYC Taxi sample data and unzip it on your computer: taxiOneWeek.csv.zip

Additional Reading Material

If you want to read up on any of the Tessera components prior to the tutorial, you can look at the references section on tessera.io.