Issue 15

05 Sep 2016

Hello and welcome to the new issue of R Weekly!

Highlight

Digested by R Weekly Members

• forcats 0.1.0 on CRAN - forcats provides tools for categorical variables.

• Shiny tips & tricks for improving your apps and solving common problems

News & Blog Posts

Tutorials

• Profiling Rcpp package code on Windows

• Debugging in Rmd

• Why I still use Excel

• R packages for forecast combinations

• How to create a free distributed data collection “app” with R and Google Sheets

• Variables can synergize, even in a linear model

• ggtree for microbiome data

• Dual axes time series plots with various more awkward data

• RDBL – manipulate data in-database with R code only

• Make Bland Altman Plots with Marginal Histograms using ggExtra

• Visualizing evolutionary dynamics with ggmuller

• Choose a good heatmap color scale with viridis

R in the Real World

• Philadelphia’s Changing Climate

• Analyzing #first7jobs tweets with MonkeyLearn and R

• Visualizing sort algorithms with ggplot2

• What we spend: Consumer Expenditures in 2015

• Recent economic and housing market trends: August 2016

• Analyzing NBA basketball data with R

• A Statistical Approach To Understanding Why Humans Are Bad at Predictions

• Beneath the waves climate change puts marine life on the move

• A Sentiment Analysis of Hamilton

• The Butterfly Affectation: A case study in embedding an external image in an R plot

• Mapping Traffic Fatalities

• The R community is awesome (and fast)

• RClimate Script to Assess Local Hot Day Trends

R for Fun

• Trump Goggles Android app - Twitter to R to GitHub to Android

R in Organization

• The R Consortium Funds Three Projects in July

• Presidential Election Predictions 2016 (an ASA competition)

Video and Podcast

• Profvis: Profiling Tools for Faster R Code

• Video series: Introduction to Microsoft R Server

Resources

• Shiny tips & tricks for improving your apps and solving common problems

• Getting used to R, RStudio, and R Markdown

• A MODERN DIVE into Data with R

New Releases

• rmdformats - Material HTML rmarkdown format now on Github.

• thesisdown - An updated R Markdown thesis template using the bookdown package.

• rfoaas 1.1.0 - Access the most excellent FOAAS service from R.

• quantmod 0.4-6 - Quantitative Financial Modelling & Trading Framework for R.

• tibble 1.2.0 - tbl_df class that offers better checking and printing capabilities than traditional data frames.

• RProtoBuf 0.4.5 - now with protobuf v2 and v3!

• Rcpp 0.12.7 - more updates and bug fixes.

New Packages & Tools

• forcats 0.1.0 on CRAN - forcats provides tools for categorical variables.

R Project Updates

Updates from R Core.

• There are new entry points R_MakeExternalPtrFn and R_ExternalPtrFn to facilitate creating and retrieving an R external pointer from a C function pointer without ISO C warnings about the conversion of function pointers.

• abbreviate() gets option named = TRUE.

• mccollect() now returns a named list (as documented) called with wait=FALSE.

• citation() supports inst/CITATION files from package source trees, with lib.loc pointing to the directory containing the package.

• R CMD build will now give priority to vignettes produced from files in the ‘vignettes’ directory over those in the inst/doc directory, with a warning that the latter are being ignored.

• The unexported low-level functions in package parallel for passing serialized R objects to and from forked children now support long vectors on 64-bit platforms. This removes some limits on higher-level functions such as mclapply() (but returning gigabyte results from forked processes via serialization should be avoided if at all possible).

• try() gains a new argument outFile with a default that can be modified via options(try.outFile = .), useful notably for Sweave.

• The radix sort considers NA_real_ and NaN to be equivalent in rank (like the other sort algorithms).

• When index.return=TRUE is passed to sort.int(), the radix sort treats NAs like sort.list() does (like the other sort algorithms).

• In integer arithmetic, NULL is now treated as integer(0) whereas it was previously treated as double(0).

Upcoming Events

• EARL 2016 London 13 September - 15 September
  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.
  

Quote of the Week

PSA: if you're a non-native English speaker, make sure you check urban dictionary when coming up with package names #rstats

— Hadley Wickham (@hadleywickham) August 30, 2016

So ... I got engaged on #satRdays. pic.twitter.com/1B7QO7WhjQ

— Romain François (@romain_francois) September 3, 2016