Interfacing R with Web Technologies for Interactive Statistical Graphics and Computing with Data

The following describes a collection of software interfaces for data acquisition and visualization. All of these interfaces are freely available as extension packages to the R language and leverage web technologies to support accessible and portable data science workflows. The majority of this work (LDAvis, animint, and plotly) focuses on interactive visualization. These interfaces fall roughly into two categories: (1) domain-specific (LDAvis) and (2) general purpose tools for interactive data visualization (animint and plotly). More specifically, the LDAvis package produces an interactive visualization to aid interpretation of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model output. The animint and plotly packages are more general, and both aim to make interactive web graphics a practically useful tool for common exploratory data analysis tasks

Michelle Nunn’s midterm result shows that Georgia’s demographics may be shifting to favor the Democrats

In Georgia’s Senate race Republican David Purdue defeated Democrat Michelle Nunn by nearly eight points, despite polling that had shown a much closer contest. Jamie L. Carson, Joel Sievert, and Ryan D. Williamson reflect on Georgia’s midterm election results, writing that in gaining more than 40 percent of the vote, Nunn outperformed many previous Democratic candidates in the state. They argue that if the Democratic Party continues to field good candidates in Georgia, shifting demographics may mean that they will be able to take statewide races within a few election cycles

Predicting Academic Performance: A Systematic Literature Review

The ability to predict student performance in a course or program creates opportunities to improve educational outcomes. With effective performance prediction approaches, instructors can allocate resources and instruction more accurately. Research in this area seeks to identify features that can be used to make predictions, to identify algorithms that can improve predictions, and to quantify aspects of student performance. Moreover, research in predicting student performance seeks to determine interrelated features and to identify the underlying reasons why certain features work better than others. This working group report presents a systematic literature review of work in the area of predicting student performance. Our analysis shows a clearly increasing amount of research in this area, as well as an increasing variety of techniques used. At the same time, the review uncovered a number of issues with research quality that drives a need for the community to provide more detailed reporting of methods and results and to increase efforts to validate and replicate work.Peer reviewe

Interfacing R with Web Technologies for Interactive Statistical Graphics and Computing with Data

The following describes a collection of software interfaces for data acquisition and visualization. All of these interfaces are freely available as extension packages to the R language and leverage web technologies to support accessible and portable data science workflows. The majority of this work (LDAvis, animint, and plotly) focuses on interactive visualization. These interfaces fall roughly into two categories: (1) domain-specific (LDAvis) and (2) general purpose tools for interactive data visualization (animint and plotly). More specifically, the LDAvis package produces an interactive visualization to aid interpretation of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model output. The animint and plotly packages are more general, and both aim to make interactive web graphics a practically useful tool for common exploratory data analysis tasks.</p

Replication Data for: Congressional Candidates in the Era of Party Ballots

Replication data and R files for "Congressional Candidates in the Era of Party Ballots" and the supplemental online appendix

Replication Data for: Nationalization and the Incumbency Advantage

Legislative scholars have investigated both the growth in the incumbency advantage since the early 1970s as well as its decline in recent decades, but there are several unanswered questions about this phenomenon. In this paper, we examine the incumbency advantage across a much wider swath of history to better understand its connection with changing levels of electoral nationalization. Based on an analysis of U.S. House elections extending back to the antebellum era, we find that the incumbency advantage fluctuates in predictable ways over time with changes in nationalization, which can be a product of both institutional and political conditions. We also demonstrate that the increased influence of local forces in congressional elections may not be strictly necessary nor sufficient for the existence of an incumbency advantage