Course Project – Interactive Shiny App
MAS 627
Project Description
The purpose of this project is to make you go from raw data to an interactive web app in R via the shiny package. shiny apps are one way to allow users to interact with the data outside of R. shiny is one of the more advanced topics in R.
Done well, this project will result in something you can add to your portfolio and show off to potential employers.
You may work in teams of 1, 2 or 3 on this project. If you would like help finding a group, please let me know ASAP.
Project Requirements
In order to complete this project you need to find a dataset, ideally related to a topic that interests you. The data should require some amount of data cleaning / manipulation, i.e. no “textbook” data or the UCI Machine Learning repository. You are welcome to use multiple datasets from multiple sources if desired. I’m not setting a minimum on the amount of cleaning required; if you find a relatively clean dataset you can balance it out with more work in the app, if you find yourself working through a very complicated cleaning process, I’ll understand that as well. I’m going to be looking at overall workload, creativity, and quality when grading.
• Your shiny app should have the following at a minimum: – One visualization
– Three interactive features (inputs) – A formatted layout
∗ You can default to sidebarLayout() unless something else will make more sense You must submit these items:
1. Your clean data
2. The code for cleaning/preparing your data (a .R file) 3. The code for your app (a .R file)
• 2-3 can be in one file if cleaning code is short 4. A link to your app online
• You will publish your app to shinyapps.io.
• Instructions on Blackboard (see Announcements) 5. Brief write-up
• Please provide me with a high level overview of your app. What data you found, what the app does, etc. Consider including screenshots of your app as well.
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Some links you might find useful
Data sources:
Find data on a topic that interests you! Finding something that interests you will result in a better project than simply going out to the internet and looking for an easy dataset. You can probably find some data for nearly any topic. Below are some links to help get you started, but do not feel that you need to use these sources.
• data.world
• Data is Plural
• Kaggle datasets – https://www.kaggle.com/datasets
– Tons of data sets that have been used for machine learning and predictive modeling.
• Data.gov – I think this site aggregates a lot of the state and city level data, and includes federal data.
Lots of stuff here (over 200,000 datasets).
• Most major cities are making data publicly available, just Google City Name + Open Data and see
what you find.
– Miami – https://opendata.miamidade.gov/
– New York – https://opendata.cityofnewyork.us/ – Chicago – https://data.cityofchicago.org/
– Boston – https://data.cityofboston.gov/
– Baltimore – https://data.baltimorecity.gov/
• Finance data can be read directly into R (see me) or downloaded from Yahoo/Google finance
• Twitter data can be read directly into R
• Census and American Community Survey – https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/
• United Nations data – http://data.un.org/
• Airbnb / Zillow
• ESPN
Shiny Links:
• @ShinyappsRecent on Twitter – https://twitter.com/shinyappsrecent?lang=en – See what other people are doing for some ideas or inspiration
• Shiny gallery on R Studio – https://shiny.rstudio.com/gallery/
– Some good samples, from basic to very advance.
– Displays code as well, useful if you want to use a certain template or layout.
• Shiny tutorial on R Studio – https://shiny.rstudio.com/tutorial/
– This is probably overkill but these tutorials go through everything you could possibly want to do. – The “Written tutorial” near the bottom is shorter and simpler.
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