Methods Bites

Blog of the MZES Social Science Data Lab

regplane3D: Plotting 3D regression predictions in R

2021-03-19 19 min read tutorials [Denis Cohen Nick Baumann]

The interpretation and presentation of empirical findings from (generalized) linear models has come a long way in the social sciences. Researchers increasingly visualize substantively meaningful quantities of interest such as expected values, first differences, and average marginal effects and consistently include uncertainty estimates in the form of analytical, simulation-based, or bootstrapped confidence intervals. However, existing interpretations and presentations are typically restricted to bivariate patterns which show (changes in) expected values as function of a single predictor, holding all else constant. This can be a significant limitation, especially when substantive inquiries focus on the interplay of two variables in predicting an outcome. To interpret and visualize such applications effectively, researchers must extend their presentations to include a third dimension. In this Methods Bites Tutorial, Denis Cohen and Nick Baumann introduce and showcase the regplane3D package, a tool for plotting 3D regression predictions in R. Continue reading

Shiny Apps: Development and Deployment

Shiny Apps allow developers and researchers to easily build interactive web applications within the environment of the statistical software R. Using these apps, R users can interactively communicate their work to a broader audience. In this Method Bites Tutorial, Konstantin Gavras and Nick Baumann present a comprehensive recap of Konstantin Gavras’ (University of Mannheim) workshop materials to illustrate how Shiny Apps enable vivid data presentation as well as its usefulness as an analytical tool. Continue reading

Studying Politics on and with Wikipedia

The online encyclopedia Wikipedia, together with its sibling, the collaboratively edited knowledge base Wikidata, provides incredibly rich yet largely untapped sources for political research. In this Methods Bites Tutorial, Denis Cohen and Nick Baumann offer a hands-on recap of Simon Munzert’s (Hertie School of Governance) workshop materials to show how these platforms can inform research on public attention dynamics, policies, political and other events, political elites, and parties, among other things. Continue reading