XML Assignments

Zillow

Sign up with Zillow.com to get a free "Zillow Web Service Identifier" (ZWS-ID). ThenPossible tasks
  • use the code from the example in the lecture to make queries to get estimates for different houses
  • For a given house (identified by Zillow Property ID (an integer)) get information about the comparable houses and explore the distribution of values. Then explore the joint distribution of estimated value and
    • number of square foot,
    • lot size,
    • number of rooms,
    • number of bathrooms,
    • year built,
    • last sold price and date
  • Some sample code
     reply = getForm("http://www.zillow.com/webservice/GetDeepComps.htm",
               'zws-id' = "xxxxxxxxxx",
                zpid = 24842792,
                count = 10)
       # then parse the XML
      doc = xmlInternalTreeParse(reply, asText = TRUE) 	    
      top = xmlRoot(doc)
      names(tt[["response"]][[1]][["comparables"]])
      cat(saveXML(tt[["response"]][[1]][["comparables"]][[1]]))
    

    Statistical Journal Bibliographies

    Full description & Links to Data

    Read data detailing papers in various the XML bibliographies of various statistical journals and do some exploratory data analysis to

    2004 National Election

    Scrape the data from the 2004 presidential election results by state (not county) from the USA today HTML pages.
  • Compare presidential race to Senate and house races.
    For each state, get the information (name, party, number of votes) about the winners of the senate and house seats, total number of votes in race, and "compare" with the presidential outcome across the 50 states.
  • RSS Feeds

    RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication and it is. Parse and explore the content of an RSS feed of interest to you, e.g.

    European Central Bank Exchange Rates

    The exchange rates for different currencies from 1999 to the present is available from the European Central Bank at http://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/eurofxref/eurofxref-hist.xml

    Read this data into R an explore it graphically.


    Duncan Temple Lang <duncan@wald.ucdavis.edu>
    Last modified: Wed Jul 16 06:29:50 PDT 2008