Interactive stock visualizations with R

Jeroen Ooms, who recently completed his Masters in Statistics at Utrech University, has created an outstanding web-based drag-and-drop application for visualizing financial data. With his “StockPlot” t application, you can select any stock from a number of world exchanges (including NASDAQ, DAX, FTSE), and drag it to a worksheet to see a time-series of the stock price. You can arrange up to four charts on the same worksheet for comparison purposes, and control the timeframe and appearance of each chart. This video makes the process clearer, or you can just try it out.

The graphs themselves are created on demand in R using the ggplot2 package, with the webserver calling R via RApache. The interactive front-end was created by Jeroen using the ExtJS framework. According to Jeroen, the entire application took around a month to create. Jeroen has used similar techniques to build several interactive applications around R, which you can find at his website. You can find more details about the implementation of these applications in his presentation at this year’s UseR conference.

It’s nice to see more and more interactive applications based on R appearing. I agree with Jeroen, who says: “I think the connection between R and the web is very powerful and believe that in five years from now, companies and universities will replace their expensive inefficient (commercial) statistical software packages by server-based web applications.” Keep up the great work, Jeroen, and thanks for encouraging others to do the same.