Issue 13

22 Aug 2016

Hello and welcome to the new issue of R Weekly!

Highlight

Digested by R Weekly Members

• Bayesian Statistics explained to Beginners in Simple English

News & Blog Posts

Tutorials

• R Markdown to WordPress Demo

• Fastest way of loading Stata dataset in R

• Practicing Machine Learning Techniques in R with MLR Package

• Learning Path : Step by Step Guide for Beginners to Learn SparkR

• Venn Colors: Happy Bday, John Venn

• YAML: Define an R function

• Extract tables from messy spreadsheets with jailbreakr

• Dual axes time series plots may be ok sometimes after all

• Making fast, good decisions with the FFTrees R package

• Probably the most useful R function I’ve ever written

• R Markdown: How to insert page breaks in a MS Word document

• Calculate Wages and Benefits in R with blscrapeR

• Can you nest parallel operations in R?

• Gaussian predictive process models in Stan

• Chi-Squared Test – The Purpose, The Math, When and How to Implement?

• ggplot2 themes examples

R in the Real World

• Data swarms: Your firearms are useless against them!

• Visualizing when I’m most productive during the day

• A Shiny App for Passing Bablok and Deming Regression

• Simulating local community dynamics under ecological drift

• My criticism of R numeric summary

• Mapping medical cannabis dispensaries: from PDF table to Google Map with R

R in Academia

• ggtree paper published

• The mismatch between current statistical practice and doctoral training in ecology - The use of R in modern ecological research.

Resources

• R Script Showcase from Power BI

• Bayesian Statistics explained to Beginners in Simple English

• 15 Page Tutorial for R

• R Markdown Tour

• Kaggle Datasets

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

• cognizer - R package to wrap function calls to IBM Watson services.

• rpinterest (on CRAN) - Access to Pinterest API with R.

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.
  

Quote of the Week

Did you know that @rstudio makes a great #markdown editor? Save file as .md and press Ctrl+Shift+K to view. #rstats pic.twitter.com/tnZ5H5rBu4

— RStudio Tips (@rstudiotips) August 19, 2016

Use checkpoint("2016-08-17") to force your project to always use today's package versions from now on https://t.co/70XwjnPuAm #rstats

— One R Tip a Day (@RLangTip) August 17, 2016