Chronicles from useR! – summing up

Dear R users,
Here you are my last post on the useR! in Aalborg in which I will try to sum up what emerged from the conference, at least from my point of view since I wasn’t able to take part to all Contributed Talks: I unfortunately still haven’t the gift of ubiquity. My colleague at Quantide, Nicola, will publish his contribute next week.

First of all, I would say, if it were necessary, that dplyr is really spreading a lot all over the world: this package was present in lots of the Contributed Talks and was also underlined by Romain François, together with Rcpp and RcppParallel, in the first Invited Talk. Even in Quantide we are trying to manage data with dplyr whenever it’s possible.

Another field which in my opinion is developing a lot is web scraping and connection between R and databases: lots of new techniques and R packages to do it are arising and most of the existing ones are growing up very quickly.

Dealing with R IDEs, RStudio has really reached a world standard level, even if there would be other ones, like Architect which could be very interesting. However my sensation is that they probably arrived too late with respect to RStudio.

Concerning with statistics modeling I noticed that almost all Contributed Talks about it dealt with random forests: this statistical technique seems to be very powerful in lots of situations, thus I advice to invest time to learn and use it appropriately.

Furthermore Spatial statistics is developing faster and faster and even here R seems to keep its pace, also because lots of people, in a very clever way from my point of view, link the growth of spatial statistics to the growth of some R packages to deal with spatial data.

See you soon, at the next Chronicle…