R Weekly 2017 Issue 9

27 Feb 2017

Highlight

• Fitting logistic regression on 100gb dataset on a laptop - Lessons learned from “Outbrain Click Prediction” kaggle competition

• Finding Radiohead’s most depressing song, with R

• How to Teach R: Common mistakes

• Factoextra R Package: Easy Multivariate Data Analyses and Elegant Visualization

R in the Real World

• Who is Alan Turing? - Last September, the British government announced its intention to pursue what has become known as the Alan Turing law.

• Putting It All Together - The U.S. labor force participation rate (LFPR) is an oft-overlooked and under- or mis-reported economic indicator.

• H-1B Visa Petitions Exploratory Data Analysis

• #AskNASA: What’s the Optimal Time for Aliens to Invade Earth?

• How Herd Immunity Works [OC]

• Fitting logistic regression on 100gb dataset on a laptop - Lessons learned from “Outbrain Click Prediction” kaggle competition

• Finding Radiohead’s most depressing song, with R

• First commit or initial commit? - Today I used the gh package to get first commits of all repositories of the ropensci and ropenscilabs organizations.

• coauthorship and citation networks

• SatRday and visual inference of vine copulas

• Predicting food preferences with sparklyr (machine learning)

Insights

• Reporting in a Repeatable, Parameterised, Transparent Way

• How to Teach R: Common mistakes

• The difference between R and Excel

• On Watering Holes, Trust, Defensible Systems and Data Science Community Security - How to install R packages securely

• rxNeuralNet vs. xgBoost vs. H2O

R Internationally

• À la découverte de Shiny — English - autotranslate

R in Organizations

• Prophet: How Facebook operationalizes time series forecasting at scale

• neuroconductor - Neuroconductor is an open-source platform for rapid testing and dissemination of reproducible computational imaging software.

R in Academia

• Free DataCamp for your Classroom

Tutorials

• Training Neural Networks with MXNet

• Make Power Fun (Again?)

• Factor Analysis with the Principal Factor Method and R

• Is my time series additive or multiplicative?

• Factoextra R Package: Easy Multivariate Data Analyses and Elegant Visualization

• The Zero Bug - Common data aggregation tools often can not “count to zero” from examples, and this causes problems.

• Bar bar plots but not Babar plots

• Mapping Biodiversity data on smaller than one degree scale

• Quick tip: knitr Python Windows setup checklist

• Part 3: Spatial analysis of geotagged data

• Raccoon Ch 2.5 – Unbalanced and Nested Anova

• How to make a global map in R, step by step

Videos and Podcasts

• R Consortium ISC Project Status Webinar

• NSSD 33 - Big Time Bubble Time - About the interview process for data science and data analyst jobs, opinionated analysis development, and what job interviews were like back in 1999.

Resources

• RStudio Extensions - An R Markdown website that documents the various ways users can extend the RStudio IDE.

New Packages and Tools

• Prophet - Prophet is a forecasting procedure implemented in R and Python. It is fast and provides completely automated forecasts that can be tuned by hand by data scientists and analysts.

• startup - Friendly R startup configuration with multiple files under .Rprofile.d/ and .Renviron.d/ that can be conditionally included / excluded based on their filenames and R features available.

• ggimage - Supports aesthetic mapping of image files to be visualized in ‘ggplot2’ graphic system.

• SentimentAnalysis - Dictionary-based sentiment analysis

• strcode - Structure and abstract your code. The strcode package contains tools to organize your code better. It consists of an RStudio Add-in to divide code into sections and a function to get a summary of a codebase.

• More January Package Picks

• ggraph - A grammar of graphics for relational data

• RcppMLPACK2 - RcppMLPACK2 and the MLPACK Machine Learning Library

New Releases

• future 1.3.0 - Unified Parallel and Distributed Processing in R for Everyone.

• leaflet 1.1.0 - interactive maps for R

• RPushbullet 0.3.1 - RPushbullet is an R client for the wonderful Pushbullet messaging / notification system.

• R Tools for Visual Studio 1.0 Preview

• padr 0.2.0 - padr::pad does now do group padding

• rmdformats 0.3.2 - The goal is to produce clean documents “out of the box”, with or without the RStudio IDE.

R Project Updates

Updates from R Core:

• Encoding name "utf8"is mapped to "UTF-8". Many implementations of iconv accept "utf8", but not GNU libiconv(including the current version 1.15).

• (C-level Native routine registration.) The undocumented styles field of the components of R_CMethodDefand R_FortranMethodDef is deprecated.

• Fix for cairo_pdf() (and svg() and cairo_ps()) when replaying saved display list that contains mix of grid and graphics output. Thanks to Yihui Xie.

• (C-level Native routine registration.) The deprecated styles component of R_CMethodDef and R_FortranMethodDef no longer does anything.

• sessionInfo() shows the full paths to the library or executable files providing the BLAS/LAPACK implementations currently in use (not available on Windows).

• grep(perl = TRUE) and friends can now make use of PCRE’s Just-In-Time mechanism, for PCRE >= 8.20 on platforms where JIT is supported. It is used by default whenever the pattern is studied, which by default requires an input x of length at least 10. (Based on a patch from Mikko Korpela.) This is controlled by a new option PCRE_use_JIT.

• There is a new option PCRE_study which controls when grep(perl = TRUE) and friends study the compiled pattern.

• The deprecated support for PCRE versions older than 8.20 will be removed in R 3.4.1. (Versions 8.20-8.31 will still be accepted but deprecated.)

• grep(perl = TRUE) and friends set a maximal recursion limit, taking into account R’s estimate of the remaining C stack space. This reduces the chance of C stack overflow, but because it is conservative may return a non-match with a warning in examples that succeeded before. (PR#16757)

• The binning algorithm used by bandwidth selectors bw.ucv(), bw.bcv() and bw.SJ() switches to a version linear in the input size n for n > nb/2 . (The calculations are the same, but for large n/nb it is worth doing the binning in advance.)

• R CMD Rd2pdf had problems with packages with non-ASCII titles in .Rd files (usually the titles were omitted).

• The internal methods of download.file() and url() now report that they cannot follow this (rather than failing silently).

• (Unix-alike) download.file(method = "auto")(the default) re-tries with method = "libcurl".

• (Unix-alike) url(method = "default")with an explicit openargument re-tries with method = "libcurl". This covers many of the usages, e.g. readLines() with a URL argument.

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

Leo Tolstoy on the #tidyverse and #rstats pic.twitter.com/KGN36yaQM4

— Sean Kross (@seankross)

Max Kuhn: "At @rstudio about 30% of our work is choosing gifs and naming functions" #rstats

— Emily Robinson (@robinson_es)