R Weekly 2017 Issue 2

Hello and welcome to this new issue!

Highlight

Tutorials

Cross-validation of topic modelling

Insights

Our R package roundup

R in the Real World

Removing Personal Bias From Flu Severity Estimation (a.k.a. Misery Loves Data)

Inflation of the US Dollar [OC]

Gene homology Part 3 – Visualizing Gene Ontology of Conserved Genes

R in Organization

Videos and Podcasts

  • NSSD 30 - Philately and Numismatology Hilary and Roger follow up on open data and data sharing in government. They also discuss artificial intelligence, self-driving cars, and doing your taxes in R.

Resources

New Packages and Tools

  • ebbr - Introducing the ebbr package for empirical Bayes estimation (using baseball statistics)

  • BelgiumMaps.StatBel - R package with Administrative boundaries of Belgium

  • Shiny Chart Builder - Shiny app for building charts with a point-and-click interface

  • tidyquant - Seamless interaction between quantitative financial analysis packages and the tidyverse.

  • TeleR - With a Telegram account connected to @TeleR, the force of R can always be with me.

New Releases

  • RcppTOML 0.1.0 - ‘Rcpp’ Bindings to Parser for Tom’s Obvious Markup Language

  • jsonlite 1.2 - A Robust, High Performance JSON Parser and Generator for R

  • digest 0.6.11 - R package to create compact hash digests of R objects

Jobs

R Project Updates

Updates from R Core,

  • Header Rconfig.h no longer defines SUPPORT_OPENMP; use _OPENMP as long documented.

  • HAVE_UINTPTR_T is now defined where appropriate by Rconfig.h so that it can be included before Rinterface.h when CSTACK_DEFNS is defined and a C compiler (not C++) is in use. Rinterface.h now includes C header stdint.h or C++11 header cstdint where needed.

  • No-longer-installed headers GraphicsBase.h, RGraphics.h, Rmodules/RX11.h and Rmodules/Rlapack.h which had a LGPL license no longer do so.

  • Enviromental variable _R_CHECK_TESTS_NLINES_ controls how R CMD check reports failing tests (see §8 of the R Internals manual).

  • The default method for quantile(x, prob) should now be monotone in prob, even in border cases, see PR#16672.

  • The check for the zlib version is now robust to versions longer than 5 characters, including 1.2.10.

  • seq("2", "5") now works too, equivalently to "2":"5" and seq.int().

  • seq.int(to=1, by=1) is now correct, other cases are integer (instead of double) when seq() is integer too, and the “non-finite” error messages are consistent between seq.default() and seq.int(), no longer mentioning NaN etc.

Call for Participation

Upcoming Events

  • rstudio::conf 2017 January 12 and 14, 2017
    The conference about all things R and RStudio.

  • SatRday #2 Conference - Cape Town, South Africa 18 Feb, 2017
    The R community and some of South Africa’s most forward thinking companies have come together to bring satRday to Cape Town. This conference brings an opportunity to hear from and network with top Researchers, Data Scientists and Developers from all over the country and the world.

  • useR! 2017 July 4, 2017
    The annual useR! conference is the main meeting of the international R user and developer community. Its program consists of both invited and user-contributed presentations.

Quotes of the Week