An Interactive User Interface Improves Data Visualization in R
Nathan Sweem · DigitalCommons - CalPoly (California State Polytechnic University) · 2015
An interactive user interface application was created using the R statistical computing environment and the Shiny package to visualize historical data on the performance of mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Historical data for these funds is scraped from the Yahoo! Finance webpage. The application allows the user to analyze this historical data by category and fund family, which are also scraped from Yahoo! Finance. The application generates interactive plots to compare the performance of selected mutual funds and ETFs given the baseline and center determined by the user. The application has been modified to attentively match the data with current available data found on Yahoo! Finance using the XML and RCurl packages. Additional modifications were constructed to provide the user with more flexibility in making selections of categories and fund families. These changes will allow for improvements in the comparisons of mutual funds and ETFs of the same category. Finally, this application will improve data visualizations in the analysis of atypicalities of mutual funds and exchange-traded funds.