Blog posts – Conor Tompkins

Analyzing US labor force participation rates with {feasts}

While looking through FRED data for work, I ran across the Labor Force Participation category. There are some interesting trend and seasonality patterns that I want to…

What region is Pittsburgh in?

Or, unsupervised demography with spatially constrained clustering

“What region is Pittsburgh in?” is a question that comes up frequently around here. Is it in Appalachia? The Midwest? Great Lakes? Mid-Atlantic? It really depends on who you…

C&S Presentation: Time Series Forecasting

This material was presented at Code & Supply on 2024-11-07

Forecasting potholes with exogenous variables

In this post I will extend the modelling approach from the previous post with exogenous variables (variables not directly about the quantity being measured in the time…

Forecasting Pittsburgh Potholes with {fable}

Potholes are the bane of Pittsburgh drivers’ existence. You can either weave around the minefield of holes in the road (some of alarming size) or risk damage to your vehicle.…

Suburbanization of Allegheny County

Allegheny County

This March, researchers at the University of Georgia and Florida State University released the HHUUD10 dataset, which contains estimates of the number of housing units for…

Making a Venn diagram in Shiny

Shiny

This blog post is about making Venn diagrams work in Shiny, and the issues I ran into with shiny::nearPoints(). I show how this impacted my initial approach, and discuss the…

Effect of Geographic Resolution on ebirdst Abundance

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eBird

While exploring some of the citizen science bird observation data available through ebirdst, I was confused by how to understand the calculation of ebirdst’s abundance metric.

COVID-19 vaccine forecast and pastcasts

Like many other Americans, I have been following the COVID-19 vaccination campaign closely. I have found the graphs and data on the NYTimes and Bloomberg sites very useful…

Pittsburgh Riverhounds under Coach Lilley

I have been a season-ticket holder with the Pittsburgh Riverhounds for a couple seasons now. The stadium has a great fan experience, and the team has gotten a lot better…

Driving Alone vs. Public Transportation in Pittsburgh

Mapping commuter modes with bivariate discretized bins

The clash between public transportation and single passenger vehicles is a heated topic of discussion nationally and in the Pittsburgh area. Public transit ridership has…

House Price Estimator Dashboard

Click here to view the full dashboard

Bike rental access in Pittsburgh

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Pittsburgh

Healthy Ride

WPRDC

This is an interactive Leaflet map of Healthy Ride access in Pittsburgh. It counts how many Healthy Ride stations are within a 10 minute bike ride of a given location. This…

Shifting political winds

Or, drawing arrows on maps

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Politics

The purpose of this post is to recreate the “Shift from 2016” arrow map that the New York Times used to show which counties became more Democratic or Republican-leaning from…

Analyzing major commuter routes in Allegheny County

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Allegheny County

Commuters

Census

Mapbox

In this post I will use the Mapbox API to calculate metrics for major commuter routes in Allegheny County. The API will provide the distance and duration of the trip, as…

Graphing volatile home values in U.S. metro areas

Housing

Zillow

Zillow publishes a variety of cool data that I haven’t explored much yet. The first dataset that caught my eye was the Zillow Home Value Index (ZHVI). Zillow describes it as…

Effect of COVID-19 on Pittsburgh parking transactions

Pittsburgh

Parking

COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic’s affect on commerce and mobility habits is well documented. For example, Apple publishes Mobility Trends reports about utilization of various…

Mapping BosWash commuter patterns with Flowmap.blue

Census

Commuters

This map shows the commuter patterns in the Northeast Megalopolis/Acela Corridor/BosWash metro area. I pulled the data from the Census Longitudinal Employer-Household…

Pittsburgh City Boundary Model Leaflet Map

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Pittsburgh

Allegheny County

Last Friday I posted a classification model that attempted to identify which census tracts in Allegheny County fall within the border of the City of Pittsburgh. I used a…

Modeling the Pittsburgh City Boundary

My goal is to create a classification model that can distinguish between census tracts that are inside the city or outside the City of Pittsburgh. The border is interrupted…

Comparing Healthy Ride Usage Pre And “Post” COVID-19

Would be interested to see this @healthyridepgh data to compare pre-covid (2019) and during (2020)

Time series clustering COVID-19 case data

Interactive Tableau visualization of the clusters

Working with Paycheck Protection Program data in R

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Politics

In this post, I walk through the process of reading in the data from the Paycheck Protection Program, and show some basic analyses that can be done.

Graphing Allegheny County COVID-19 data

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COVID-19

In this post, I review the process I use to make daily graphs from data published by the Allegheny County Health Department. I use the data posted by Franklin Chen, who…

(re)Modeling the Office

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The goal for this analysis is to determine which characters, directors, and writers from The Office most influence an episode’s IMDB rating. My hypothesis is that IMDB…