R Weekly 2017 Issue 12

20 Mar 2017

Highlight

• On Programming Languages; Why My Dad Went From Programming to Driving a Bus

• slickR in Bookdown: Rendering Canonical Interactive User Manuals

• hexSticker - Hexagon sticker with R and ggplot2.

R in the Real World

• Exploring 2017 Retail Store Closings with R

• Because its Friday… The IKEA Billy index

• Looking at Biopics of Hollywood using #fivethirtyeight #ggplot2 #ggraph

• Puts as Protection

• Mapping Housing Data with R

• Ingest and visualise Nomad Passport Index data

• How many digits into pi do you need to go to find your birthday?

Videos and Podcasts

• Learning to learn - R Weekly Podcast 2017:12 - Podcast RSS

• NSSD 34 F Dist - Hilary and Roger discuss Stitch Fix’s massive Algorithms Tour, reproducibility from a physical scientist perspective, and interpretability in machine learning.

• R and data journalism in New Zealand - Ihaka Lecture Series 2017

Insights

• The levels of data science class

• Why I love R Notebooks

• Spatial Modeling Using Statistical Learning Techniques

• What does more efficient Monte Carlo mean?

• On Programming Languages; Why My Dad Went From Programming to Driving a Bus

R in Organizations

• Data Science at StitchFix

• Running R on Amazon Athena

Resources

• Graphical and Latent Variable Modeling

• Introduction to Generalized Additive Model

• slickR in Bookdown: Rendering Canonical Interactive User Manuals

• Code, data & slides for 3-day network analysis workshop

• Intro to Spatial Analysis in R

Tutorials

• 1 dataset, 10 visualisations with R

• Quandl and Forecasting

• R + D3, A powerful and beautiful combo

• Improved Python-style Logging in R

• AUC Meets the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney U-Statistic

• Bar bar plots but not Babar plots

• K-means clustering demonstrated

• How Reproducible Data Analysis Scripts Can Help You Route Around Data Sharing Blockers

• Writing manuscripts in Rstudio, easy citations

• Ensemble Methods are Doomed to Fail in High Dimensions

• How To Set Up R on Ubuntu 14.04

• Plotting trees from Random Forest models with ggraph

• 2D contours of several penalty functions in statistics as GIF images

• Another R [Non-]Standard Evaluation Idea

• Neural Networks: How they work, and how to train them in R

• Benchmarking rxNeuralNet for OCR

• Native support for candlestick charts in Plotly and R

• Simulations to explore excessive lagged X variables in time series modelling

• Experimenting With Sankey Diagrams in R and Python

• Book Review: Testing R Code

• Unit Testing in R

• Adding figure labels (A, B, C, …) in the top left corner of the plotting region

• The R qgraph Package: Using R to Visualize Complex Relationships Among Variables in a Large Dataset, Part One

• R, GIS, and fuzzyjoin to reconstruct demographic data for NUTS regions of Denmark

• 4 tricks for working with R, Leaflet and Shiny

• Data Visualization – Part 1

New Packages & Tools

• mathpix - Convert images of mathematical equations to LaTeX for inclusion in rmarkdown documents

• PWFSLSmoke - Utilities for Working with Air Quality Monitoring Data

• mlrMBO - the toolbox for (Bayesian) Black-Box Optimization

• hexSticker - Hexagon sticker with R and ggplot2.

• iheatmapr - Complex, interactive heatmaps in R

• ncaa_bball_data - NCAA basketball team level data with tourney outcomes

• unit - Measurement units in R

New Releases

• Rcpp 0.12.10 - Provides C++ classes that greatly facilitate interfacing C or C++ code in R.

• RcppEigen 0.3.2.9.1 - Rcpp Integration for the ‘Eigen’ Templated Linear Algebra Library

• imager 0.40.1 - Image Processing Library Based on CImg

• doFuture 0.4.0 - doFuture: A universal foreach adaptor ready to be used by 1,000+ packages

• future 1.4.0 - future: Unified Parallel and Distributed Processing in R for Everyone

• future.BatchJobs 0.14.0 - future.BatchJobs: A Future API for Parallel and Distributed Processing using BatchJobs

• canvasXpress 0.14.7 - canvasXpress was developed as the core visualization component for bioinformatics and systems biology analysis at Bristol-Myers Squibb.

Call for Participation

• R Google Summer of Code 2017 - Organization Page - Students will contribute to free/open-source R packages for 3 months during the summer. Mentors get code written for their project.

R Project Updates

Updates from R Core:

• When the condition code in if(.) or while(.) is not of length one, an error instead of a warning may be triggered by setting an environment variable, see the help page.

• sample() now uses two uniforms for added precision when the uniform generator is Knuth-TAOCP, Knuth-TAOCP-2002, or a user-defined generator and the population size is 2^25 or greater.

• There is support for compiling C++14 or C++17 code in packages on suitable platforms: see Writing R Extensions for how to request this.

• configure tests for a C++17-compliant compiler. The tests are experimental and subject to change in the future.

• strwrap() reduces indent if it is more than half width rather than giving an error.

• R CMD config gains a --all option for printing names and values of all basic configure variables. It now knows about all the variables used for the C++98, C++11 and C++14 standards.

Upcoming Events

• R/Finance 2017 May 19 and 20, 2017
  From the inaugural conference in 2009, the annual R/Finance conference in Chicago has become the primary meeting for academics and practioners interested in using R in Finance.

• 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

We wanted the readxl logo to capture that special feeling you get when you hear: "We keep all our data in Excel". @hadleywickham pic.twitter.com/pBI4EFWhCj

— Jenny Bryan (@JennyBryan)