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Issue 13

Hello and welcome to the new issue of R Weekly!

Highlight

Digested by R Weekly Members

News & Blog Posts

Tutorials

Dual axes

R in the Real World

Data swarms: Your firearms are useless against them!

Visualizing when I'm most productive during the day

We Are Not Very Evenly Distributed

R in Academia

The mismatch between current statistical practice and doctoral training in ecology

Resources

New Releases

  • githubinstall 0.1.0 - New Feature for A Helpful Way to Install R Packages Hosted on GitHub – gh_install_package() and gh_suggest_username()

  • rfoass 1.0.0 - R interface to FOAAS (f@$k off as a service).

  • tidyr 0.6 - Add new feature – drop_na().

  • RQuantLib 0.4.3 - Lots of new Fixed Income functions.

  • vtreat 0.5.27 - A data.frame processor/conditioner.

  • mlr 2.9 - Interface to a large number of classification and regression techniques, including machine-readable parameter descriptions.

New Packages & Tools

R Project Updates

Updates from R Core.

  • R CMD check reports more dubious flags in files src/Makevars[.in], including -w and -g.

  • table() has been amended to be more internally consistent and become back compatible to R <= 2.7.2 again. Consequently, table(1:2, exclude=NULL) no longer contains a zero count for <NA>, but useNA = "always" continues to do so.

  • dump.frames() gets a new option include.GlobalEnv which allows to also dump the global environment.

  • R CMD check has been set up to filter important warnings from recent versions of gfortran with -Wall -pedantic: this now reports non-portable GNU extensions such as out-of-order declarations.

  • After seven years of deprecation, duplicated factor levels now produce a warning when printed and an error in levels<- instead of a warning.

  • smooth.spline() now allows direct specification of lambda, gets a hatvalues() method and keeps tol in the result.

  • Add utils::strcapture(). Given a character vector and a regular expression containing capture expressions, strcapture() will extract the captured tokens into a tabular data structure, typically a data.frame.

  • xy.coords() and xyz.coords() get a new setLab option.

  • The method argument of sort.list(), order() and sort.int() gains an "auto" option (the default) which should behave the same as before when method was not supplied.

  • boxplot(<formula>, *) gets optional arguments drop, sep, and lex.order to pass to split.default() which itself newly gets an argument lex.order to pass to interaction() for more flexibility.

Upcoming Events

  • satRday! in Budapest, Hungary 3 September
    The satRdays are SQLSaturday-inspired, community-led, one-day, regional and very affordable conferences around the world to support collaboration, networking and innovation within the R community.

  • EARL 2016 London 13 September - 15 Septemberth
    The primary focus of the Conference is the commercial usage of R across a range of industry sectors with the aim of sharing knowledge and applications of the language.

  • eRum 2016 Poznan, Poland 12 October - 14 October
    European R users meeting (eRum) is an international conference that aims at integrating users of the R language. eRum 2016 will be a good chance to exchange experiences, broaden knowledge on R and collaborate.

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