RevoJoe on Inside-R posted a nice list of data sources. Thanks to Tim Hesterberg for pointing this out on the Iso-stat listserv.
Jeffrey Breen just gave a talk entitled “Tapping the Data Deluge with R” to theBoston Predictive Analytics Meetup. He suggests there are two types of data in this world
Data you have, and
Data you don’t have…yet.
In the talk Jeffrey provided a nice overview of several methods for importing data into R, including:
Reading CSV files
Reading XLS files
First the good news:
And now the bad: It costs you $50/ year for your data to truly belong to you. For a ‘premium’ membership, you can visit your data as often as you choose. If only Andy had posted sooner, I would have saved $50. But, dear readers, in order to explore all avenues, I spent the bucks. And here’s some data (screenshot–I don’t want you analyzing my data!
Yelp is a website on which people review local businesses. In their own words, Yelp describes themselves as an “online urban city guide that helps people find cool places to eat, shop, drink, relax and play, based on the informed opinions of a vibrant and active community of locals in the know.”
Earlier this year, Yelp released a subset of their data to be used for academic use. The dataset includes business data (e.
Getting data out of a FitBit, as Rob pointed out, is not as easy as simply clicking an export button on the FitBit website. Fortunately, FitBit released their API to developers in February and since then a few solutions of obtaining the raw data have been realized. John McLaughlin has written an open source script (available on GitHub) that enables FitBit users to download their data into a Google spreadsheet.
I just bought a “personal fitness tracking device.” It records my every movement. Even keeps track of when I sleep, in theory at least. So far, its pretty cool. Certainly its made me aware of how many steps I take during a day, and how rarely I meet the sacred 10,000 step goal. Today, for example, I’ve taken 8748 steps. Although, since its 9:30pm, the day is still young.
What’s frustrating is that even though its my data, it’s not “mine”.
