By Ari Lamstein
Today I am happy to announce the R Election Analysis Contest. The goal of the contest is to encourage and promote high quality reproducible research in R that focuses on elections. The winner will be featured on my blog and receive a free copy of my course Mapmaking in R with Choroplethr as well as a copy of Hadley Wickham’s book Advanced R.
Why a contest?
As I write this, the US Presidential Primary is dominating the news. What strikes me about the news is how analytical the discussion is. Major themes seem to be:
- The demographics of each voting region
- How different demographics are attracted to each party
- How different demographics are attracted to each candidate within each party
- How the above change over time
- The math behind delegates and winning both primary nominations and general elections
A major interest I have is using R to verify claims that I hear in the media. I’ve been wanting to explore voting related issues in R for a while now. And when I read pieces by Julia Silge (1, 2, 3) and Duncan McIntosh (1) I see that I am not alone.
Rather than spending a week or two on my own analysis, I think that it would be better to run a contest. If the contest gets even a modest number of entries, then I will probably enjoy reading them more than I would enjoy writing my own.
How do I enter?
To be considered, your entry must:
- Be published online by Saturday April 16, 2016. If you have a blog, you can publish it there. You can also use rPubs, which is free.
- Leave a comment on this page with a description and link to your entry. I will personally read each entry.
- Your entry must contain an analysis that is both written in R and reproducible. That is, you must write …read more
Source:: r-bloggers.com