Technometrics

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://amstat.tandfonline.com/loi/utch20

R for Political Data Science: A Practical Guide

edited by Francisco Urdinez and Andrés Cruz, Chapman and Hall/CRC, Taylor
& Francis Group, Boca Raton, FL, 2021, ISBN 978-0-367-81889-0, xix + 440 pp.,
209 b/w illustrations, $99.95 (Hardback).

Stan Lipovetsky

To cite this article: Stan Lipovetsky (2021) R for Political Data Science: A Practical Guide,
Technometrics, 63:2, 277-278, DOI: 10.1080/00401706.2021.1904743

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00401706.2021.1904743

Published online: 30 Apr 2021.

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https://amstat.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=utch20

mimicking near-concert-hall acoustics in your home, and to
a crisp broadcast at the town bandstand. Chapter 11 recalls
about the first transatlantic cables installed in several tenacious
attempts due to efforts of the American businessman Cyrus
Field and the Atlantic Telegraph Company, with the first cable
constructed from Newfoundland to Ireland. French laid another
cable in 1869–79, and it had been in operation up to 1959. Before
the cables, all messages across the ocean had to be sent by boat
which took a minimum of 10 days. The telegraph took this
down to 1.5 h, when working optimally. The expense of this new
infrastructure was $20 million; to put this into perspective, the
United States purchased Alaska the following year for $7.2 mil-
lion. And to transmit one word on this cable cost $10, more than
a week’s earnings for a typical laborer. Our present transatlantic
calls and web traffic are now routed through fiber-optic cables.
The first fiber-optic cable, the TAT-8, was commissioned in
1988, and today the fiber optic cables that cross the Atlantic
deliver 10,000 times more information in one second than the
first cables could deliver in a century of operation. Chapter 12
describes development of beacons and lighthouses from ancient
Greeks to the invention by Augustin Fresnel, a French engineer,
who created a compound lens that efficiently focused a large
fraction of light from a single source into a concentrated beam.
Chapter 13 is devoted to Charles H. Town, American inventor
of the maser and laser. He won the 1964 Nobel Prize in physics
(shared with Russian scientists N. Basov and A. Prokhorov,
although the earlier inventor of the maser and laser from the
soviet side was a physicist Michail Martynovich Vudynsky—
S.L.). Chapter 14 presents prof. Chen Jia’er, the head of Peking
University’s Institute of High Energy Physics and of the National
Natural Science Foundation of China, and Chapter 15 presents
prof. Jean Tran Thanh Van, from the International Center for
Interdisciplinary Science and Education in Vietnam.
In Part II, “Mentors and Milestones,” contains topics and
personalities of the author’s career in lasers and magnetic
fusion research, particle accelerators and materials science, and
new energy sources. Chapters 16–27 describe building a ruby
laser, a molecular microscope, fusion experiments and devices,
wind turbines, research on plasma, experiments on graphene
sheet and nanotubes, building of LHC in Geneva, Switzerland,
Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) project and its cancela-
tion, Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF)
and the Superconducting RF (SRF) technology, free electron
laser technologies and Laser Interferometer Gravitational
Observatory (LIGO), detection of black holes and their colli-
sions. In 2015 gravitational waves were first detected, in 2017
collisions of two neutron stars were observed with help of new
“multi-messenger” technologies in astronomy. One unique
observation was the detection of a gamma ray burst nearly
coincident with the detection of gravitational waves emanating
from the collision, which confirmed that gravity waves travel
at the speed of light, as Einstein predicted. Part III, “Science
Policy Matters,” explains in Chapters 28–33 the importance
of science to wide audiences, including children and students,
the general public, informed decision makers and legislators.
History of the American industrial revolution, science and
engineering growth, economic development and return on
scientific investments, experiments on massively online open
courses (MOOCs), the role of the U.S. National Science
BOOK REVIEWS 277
Foundation (NSF) and science museums are discussed. Part
IV, “Communicating Science,” in Chapters 34–41 explores roles
of professional scientific journals. Scholars publish in English
nearly three million journal articles a year in over 33,000
scholarly journals, and the number of journal titles has grown
roughly 3% a year since the first scholarly journals appeared
over three and a half centuries ago. The effectiveness of the
WWW search tools in the text and data mining is growing,
and it greatly enhances possibilities of serendipitous discoveries
with help of accumulation and transfer of a new information
in contemporary civilization. The problems of unreliable or
unethical papers, of the National Digital Public Library (NDPL),
of the disseminating scholar research are also discussed. Part
V “Art and Science,” in Chapters 42–45 is devoted to the
science presentation via natural and artistic artifacts, describing
mineral and fossil exhibitions, planetarium and astronomical
demonstrations, archeology and art museums, galleries with
wood carving and watercolor painting (see also Lipovetsky
and Mandel 2009). Acknowledgments to dozens of people and
Epilogue resume the book with the author’s thoughts on science
and humanity in their fight with the virus pandemic of 2020,
quickly developed tests and vaccines, and continuing trials
and research with already more than 50,000 journal articles
published on the associated topics (see, e.g., Special Issue on
Pandemics 2021).
Multiple rare historical archive pictures illustrate the themes,
and the references on the original sources are given in each
chapter. The book presents a fascinating livid history of science
which can be highly appreciated by any reader interested to learn
more about our civilization in it progress during mostly the last
century.
Stan Lipovetsky
Minneapolis, MN
References
Lipovetsky S., and Mandel I. (2009), “How Art Helps to Understand Statis-
tics,” Model Assisted Statistics and Applications, 4, 313–324. [277]
Special Issue on Pandemics. (2021), Model Assisted Statistics and Applica-
tions, vol. 16, Amsterdam, The Netherlands: IOS Press. [277]
R for Political Data Science: A Practical Guide, edited
by Francisco Urdinez and Andrés Cruz, Chapman and
Hall/CRC, Taylor & Francis Group, Boca Raton, FL, 2021,
ISBN 978-0-367-81889-0, xix + 440 pp., 209 b/w
illustrations, $99.95 (Hardback).
The monograph belongs to The R Series, and presents a refer-
ence textbook on R language with a semester course on statistics
with application to estimations on real political data. The book
consists of three parts covering sixteen chapters, written by near
a dozen authors – mostly specialists on politics and economics
of South American countries.
Part I, “Introduction to R”, contains four chapters. Chap-
ter 1 describes R basics, including installation, RStudio and
console, scripts and objects, vectors and functions, packages
and libraries, with multiple examples of codes and screenshots.
278 BOOK REVIEWS
Chapter 2 presents data management tools with various oper-
ations and commands, data transformation and pivoting – all
in numerous practical examples. Chapter 3 deals with data
visualization with help of tidyverse and ggplot2 packages, and
multiple examples presented in different kind of graphs. Chapter
4 focuses on data loading, explaining various dataset formats,
and downloading from other statistical software.
Part II, “Models”, consists of five chapters. Chapter 5 dis-
cusses the descriptive statistics and scatterplots, distributions
and correlation matrix, simple linear and multiple regressions
in ordinary least squares (OLS) modeling, inference and diag-
nostics – in various examples and R implementations. Chapter
6 considers typical outliers and influential cases. Chapter 7
continues with panel data, lags and leads, time-series models,
fixed and random effects, testing for unit roots and robust errors.
Chapter 8 presents logistic regression for binary outcome built
as generalized linear models (GLM), with visual representa-
tion of results, Akaike and Bayesian information criteria (AIC
and BIC, respectively) for measures of fit, Receiver Operating
Characteristics (ROC) curves and Area Under the Curve (AUC)
score. Chapter 9 presents methods of survival analysis, explain-
ing Cox’s proportional hazard models and their implementa-
tions via R packages. Chapter 10, written by the known expert
on the causal inference Andrew Heiss, includes questions of
the directed acyclic graphs (DAG) and statistical associations,
measures of causal effects and do-calculus, drawing DAGs and
finding paths and adjustment sets with R, propensity scores,
matching, inverse probability weighting.
Part III of “Applications” shows how the above given tech-
niques and R tools can be implemented for political data in var-
ious problems. Chapter 11 uses Brazil and Chile official datasets
to demonstrate an advance data management, with standardiz-
ing codes and merging datasets, missing data imputation and
regression modeling performed by R functions. Chapter 12
presents the Web mining and Web scraping in R, describing an
example of the Organization of American States (OAS) press
releases, loading and extracting information of the html texts
from Google, recipes for custom functions and Application
Programming Interfaces (API), and search for specific tweets
and download data from Twitter. Chapter 13 suggests quanti-
tative analysis of political texts, including Twitter data explo-
ration, most-used hashtags and wordclouds, preprocessing by
the algorithm of Wordfish and Structural Topic Models (STM)
in diagnostics and analysis of texts. Chapter 14 is devoted to
the important in politics connections revealed via the networks,
describing their nodes and links, adjacency matrix and datasets
in graphs presentation, measures of centrality and closeness,
eigenproblem analysis and applications in R. Chapter 15 con-
tinues with Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and dimen-
sionality reduction, in application to a measure of index of trust
in democracy in Latin American countries. Chapter 16 finalizes
with maps and spatial data, demonstrating how to perform a
mapping of countries and regions by different variables, and
to apply such index as the Moran’s I for spatial correlation,
estimated by R facilities. The book is concluded with the Bib-
liography of about 150 sources, and a comprehensive Index.
Each chapter suggests references on the recent sources, exer-
cises, and links to numerous websites with data, packages and
other R facilities. The book is convenient as a textbook for
students, and is equally helpful for researcher and practitioners.
The main material in the book consists of R codes, that supplies
the readers with amazingly useful tools of modeling not only in
political but in a wider area of applied social and other sciences,
wherever the statistical analysis is required.
Stan Lipovetsky
Minneapolis, MN
Understanding the Analytic Hierarchy Process, by
Konrad Kulakowski, Boca Raton, FL: Chapman and
Hall/CRC, Taylor & Francis Group, 2021, 262 pp., $130.00
(Hardback), ISBN 978-1-1380-3232-3.
The monograph belongs to the Series in Operations
Research, and presents the method and methodology of Ana-
lytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)—one of the most popular tools of
the practical multiple-criteria decision making (MCDM). AHP
was proposed by Thomas Saaty in 1977, and from that time it
has been developed and applied in numerous works. The book
consists of eleven chapters, each divided into subsections—let
us describe them in more detail.
Chapter 1, “AHP as a Decision-Making Method,” starts with
a general introduction of the AHP, explaining why and for
which aims the decision-making approaches are needed, and
describing how the alternatives are compared under each of sev-
eral possible criteria and sub-criteria constituting a hierarchical
structure. It considers the pairwise comparisons (PC) matrix of
the priority ratios elicited from an expert for each two within
a set of alternatives related to each criterion, and the PC among
the criteria themselves. The PC quotients are elicited in the ratio
scale using the values from 9 for a maximum prevalence of
one item over another one, and going with the step one till the
equal value 1 of the compared items. When the local priorities
for each PC matrix are found, the averaging of these vectors
weighted by the elements of the criteria priority defines the
global priorities among the alternatives combined by all criteria
(with possible sub-criteria weighted averaging as well). The
problem of intransitivity between the matrix elements and the
matrix inconsistency is also described, and two classical AHP
problems of a house to buy and a car selection are presented.
Chapter 2, “PC Matrices,” describes the cardinal values of
AHP matrices, where an ijth element defines the elicited pair-
wise value of how many times the ith item is preferred to the jth
one, and the symmetric across the matrix diagonal jith element
corresponds to the reciprocal value of how many times the jth
item is preferred to the i-th one. The diagonal values of such
a matrix equal one, as by them an item is compared with itself,
although it can occasionally differ from 1, for instance, in a blind
wine testing. Sometimes the ordinal values of +1 and -1 are used
for indicating the prevalence between the items instead of their
cardinal pairwise quotients. Additive PC matrices, matrices with
missed elements, and presentation of PC matrices as directed
and undirected graphs are given too. Fuzzy PC matrices for
representation of uncertain preferences with elements described
by triangular and trapezoidal, gaussian and flatten-bell distribu-
tions are discussed as well.