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R Weekly 2017 Issue 7

Highlight

R in the Real World

Analysis of 100 Million Taxi Trips in Chicago Shows Usage Declining 35% Per Year

Making a Beautiful Map of Spain in ggplot2

What Programming Languages Are Used Most on Weekends?

Insights

R Internationally

R in Organization

Tutorials

Diving Into Dynamic Website Content with splashr

Twitter sentiment analysis with Machine Learning in R using doc2vec approach

Introduction to ggraph

Videos and Podcasts

Resources

New Packages and Tools

  • splashr - Tools to Work with the ‘Splash’ JavaScript Rendering Service in R

  • FTRL - R/Rcpp implementation of the ‘Follow-the-Regularized-Leader’ algorithm

  • mfe - Extracts meta-features from datasets to support the design of recommendation systems based on Meta-Learning.

New Releases

  • anytime 0.2.1 - Anything to POSIXct or Date Converter

  • random 0.2.6 - random provides GNU R with easy access to the true random numbers provided by random.org

  • RcppArmadillo 0.7.700.0.0 - RcppArmadillo provides an interface from R to and from Armadillo.

Call for Participation

  • Apply to attend rOpenSci unconf 2017! - For a fourth year running, rOpenSci is excited to announce another unconference in 2017 with a new venue in ☀ Downtown LA. We’re organizing this event to bring together scientists, developers, and open data enthusiasts from academia, industry, government, and non-profit to get together for a few days and hack on various projects.

R Project Updates

Updates from R Core:

  • The maximum number of DLLs that can be loaded into R e.g. via dyn.load can now be increased by setting the environment variable R_MAX_NUM_DLLS before starting R.

  • The version of LAPACK included in the sources has been updated to 3.7.0: no new routines have been added to R.

  • Matrix products now consistently bypass BLAS when the inputs have NaN/Inf values. Performance of the check of inputs has been improved. Performance when BLAS is used is improved for matrix/vector and vector/matrix multiplication (DGEMV is now used instead of DGEMM).

  • Loading the parallel package namespace no longer sets or changes the .Random.seed, even if R_PARALLEL_PORT is unset.

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

  • Package tools has a new function package_native_routine_registration_skeleton() to assist adding native-symbol registration to a package. See its help and §5.4.1 of Writing R Extensions for how to use it.

  • Assigning to an element of a vector beyond the current length now over-allocates by a small fraction. The new vector is marked internally as growable, and the true length of the new vector is stored in the truelength field.

  • If a reference class has a validity method, validObject will be called automatically from the default initialization method for reference classes.

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.

More past events at R conferences & meetups.

Quotes of the Week