Smoothing variables to decrease variation

We saw in the last chapter how to use Incanter Zoo to work with time series data and how to smooth values using a running mean. However, sometimes we'll want to smooth data that doesn't have a time component. For instance, we may want to track the usage of a word throughout a larger document or set of documents.

Getting ready

For this, we'll need usual dependencies:

(defproject statim "0.1.0"
  :dependencies [[org.clojure/clojure "1.6.0"]
                 [incanter "1.5.5"]])

We'll also require those in our script or REPL:

(require '[incanter.core :as i]
         '[incanter.stats :as s]
         '[incanter.charts :as c]
         '[clojure.string :as str])

For this recipe, we'll look at Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. You can download this from Project Gutenberg at http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1661/pg1661.txt or http://www.ericrochester.com/clj-data-analysis/data/pg1661.txt.

How to do it…

We'll look at the distribution of baker over...