R Weekly 2017 Issue 6

Highlight

R in the Real World

Exploring News Coverage With newsflash

Open Data R Meetup: exploring the Distribution of Traffic Accidents in Belgrade, 2015 in R

Using R and satellite data to identify marine bioregions

Visualizing housing value distributions by metro

Insights

Superheat: supercharged heatmaps for R

R in Organization

R in Academia

Tutorials

Importing Data into R, part II

The real meaning of spurious correlations

Videos and Podcasts

Resources

New Packages and Tools

  • ShinyTester - A package that helps you build Shiny apps

  • nazihuntR - tools to explore the Institute of National Remembrance Nazis of Auschwitz data

  • maltese - Little R utility package for making time series data more machine learning-friendly

  • newsflash - Tools to Work with the Internet Archive and GDELT Television Explorer in R

  • provisionr - 📦📦➡️🏛 Provision a library of R packages

New Releases

  • tidyxl 0.2.1 for importing messy spreadsheets, including cell formatting.

  • unpivotr 0.1.0 for unpivoting complex tables with multi-level headers, especially pivot tables.

  • roxygen2 6.0.0 - roxygen2 helps you document your packages by turning specially formatted inline comments into R’s standard Rd format.

  • nzpullover 0.0.2 - road policing data from New Zealand.

  • RPushbullet 0.3.0 - RPushbullet interfacing the neat Pushbullet service for inter-device messaging, communication, and more.

  • gunsales 0.1.2 - Statistical analysis of monthly background checks of gun purchases

  • nanotime 0.1.1 - Nanosecond-Resolution Time for R

  • RcppCCTZ 0.2.1 - Rcpp bindings for the CCTZ library

Jobs

R Project Updates

Updates from R Core:

  • Improved performance and robustness of matrix multiplication using BLAS: DGEMV is now used instead of DGEMM for matrix/vector and vector/matrix multiplication, DGEMM/DGEMV is bypassed when the input has NaN or Inf values, and performance for these input checks has been improved.

  • qbeta() underflowed too early in some very asymmetric cases. (PR#17178)

  • tapply() gets new option default = NA allowing to change the previously hardcoded value.

  • R CMD build no longer wraps a BugReports field containing a long URL, which made it unusable in R <= 3.3.2.

  • read.dcf() now consistently interprets any whitespace to be stripped to include newlines.

  • str() no longer shows "list output truncated", in cases that list was not shown at all. Thanks to Neal Fultz (PR#17219)

Call for Participation

Upcoming Events

  • 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.

  • useR! 2017 July 4, 2017
    The annual useR! conference is the main meeting of the international R user and developer community.

Quotes of the Week