Colin is a data analyst, currently working in Whitehorse, Yukon.
Showing blog posts written by: Colin Luoma
Tags:
Tags:
About a month ago, Statistics Canada finally started releasing summary statistics for the 2016 census. The long-form census was re-introduced last year so over the course of this year there should be lots of interesting data to look through. As of right now, only information on population and dwelling counts has been released with age and sex demographics scheduled for the beginning of May 2017.
I wanted to play around with a couple new tools like leaflet and highcharts and the census population data was the perfect test dataset. Leaflet is an awesome mapping library that feels really snappy in a browser and the R wrapper is incredibly simple to use. I definitely recommend it for any type of geographic visualizations. Flexdashboard was used to create a single-page html file that I then hosted on my webserver.
I don't have much to say about the data since I'm not really in a position to make any kind of conclusions. It's mostly just interesting to see how things have changed in Canada over the past 5 years.
Earlier this week Microsoft released Halo Wars 2, a followup to the original that has somewhat of a cult following. In contrast to the mainline Halo titles, Halo Wars is a real-time strategy game. I've played through the Halo Wars 2 campaign and dipped my feet a little bit into the multiplayer. It isn't really for me (I prefer FPS) but it was still an enjoyable experience.
Similar to Halo 5, Microsoft and 343i have decided to open up much of the game details to the public through their Halo API. I really enjoyed digging through Halo 5 data and it was a big engagement point for my interest in the game. Kudos to MS/343i for the work they do on this stuff.
Even though I don't plan to continue playing the game, I decided to update my Halo R API wrapper to now include functions to easily get data from the Halo Wars 2 endpoints. Installation instructions and a tiny example can be found on the haloR Github.
Before using it, I suggest reading through the documentation provided my 343i since the documentation for my package is kind of sparse and the returned objects can be a little bit cryptic without a reference.
And as an additional small example, I pulled some Halo Wars 2 data for the game mode 'Rumble'. This is a new mode where players have infinite resources and don't have to worry about their economy. I wanted to see which leader had the highest winrates so I pulled a bunch of matches and graphed their percentages (at the top of this post). It's interesting that the two main story characters, Cutter and Atriox, have the highest winrates.