Updates to R GUIs: BlueSky, jamovi, JASP, & RKWard

Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) for the R language help beginners get started learning R, help non-programmers get their work done, and help teams of programmers and non-programmers work together by turning code into menus and dialog boxes. There has been quite a lot of progress on R GUIs since my last post on this topic. Below I describe some of the features added to several R GUIs.

BlueSky Statistics

BlueSky Statistics has added mixed-effects linear models. Its dialog shows an improved model builder that will be rolled out to the other modeling dialogs in future releases. Other new statistical methods include quantile regression, survival analysis using both Kaplan-Meier and Cox Proportional Hazards models, Bland-Altman plots, Cohen’s Kappa, Intraclass Correlation, odds ratios and relative risk for M by 2 tables, and sixteen diagnostic measures such as sensitivity, specificity, PPV, NPV, Youden’s Index, and the like. The ability to create complex tables of statistics was added via the powerful arsenal package. Some examples of the types of tables you can create with it are shown here.

Several new dialogs have been added to the Data menu. The Compute Dummy Variables dialog creates dummy (aka indicator) variables from factors for use in modeling. That approach offers greater control over how the dummies are created than you would have when including factors directly in models.

A new Factor Levels menu item leads to many of the functions from the forcats package. They allow you to reorder factor levels by count, by occurrence in the dataset, by functions of another variable, allow you to lump low-frequency levels into a single “Other” category, and so on. These are all helpful in setting the order and nature of, for example, bars in a plot or entries in a table.

The BlueSky Data Grid now has icons that show the type of variable i.e. factor, ordered factor, string, numeric, date or logical. The Output Viewer adds icons to let you add notes to the output (not full R Markdown yet), and a trash can icon lets you delete blocks of output.

A comprehensive list of the changes to this release is located here and my updated review of it is here.

jamovi

New modules expand jamovi’s capabilities to include time-based survival analysis, Bland-Altman analysis & plots, behavioral change analysis, advanced mediation analysis, differential item analysis, and quantiles & probabilities from various continuous distributions.

jamovi’s new Flexplot module greatly expands the types of graphs it can create, letting you take a single graph type and repeat it in rows and/or columns making it easy to visualize how the data is changing across groups (called facet, panel, or lattice plots).

You can read more about Flexplot here, and my recently-updated review of jamovi is here.

JASP

The JASP package has added two major modules, machine learning, and network analysis. The machine learning module includes boosting, K-nearest neighbors, and random forests for both regression and classification problems. For regression, it also adds regularized linear regression. For clustering, it covers hierarchical, K-means, random forest, density-based, and fuzzy C-means methods. It can generate models and add predictions to your dataset, but it still cannot save models for future use. The main method it is missing is a single decision tree model. While less accurate predictors, a simple tree model can often provide insight that is lacking from other methods.

Another major addition to JASP is Network Analysis. It helps you to study the strengths of interactions among people, cell phones, etc. With so many people working from home during the Coronavirus pandemic, it would be interesting to see what this would reveal about how our patterns of working together have changed.

A really useful feature in JASP is its Data Library. It greatly speeds your ability to try out a new feature by offering a completely worked-out example including data. When trying out the network analysis feature, all I had to do was open the prepared example to see what type of data it would use. With most other data science software, you’re left to dig about in a collection of datasets looking for a good one to test a particular analysis. Nicely done!

I’ve updated my full review of JASP, which you can read here.

RKWard

The main improvement to the RKWard GUI for R is adding support for R Markdown. That makes it the second GUI to support R Markdown after R Commander. Both the jamovi and BlueSky teams are headed that way. RKWard’s new live preview feature lets you see text, graphics, and markdown as you work. A comprehensive list of new features is available here, and my full review of it is here.

Conclusion

R GUIs are gaining features at a rapid pace, quickly closing in on the capabilities of commercial data science packages such as SAS, SPSS, and Stata. I encourage R GUI users to contribute their own additions to the menus and dialog boxes of their favorite(s). The development teams are always happy to help with such contributions. To follow the progress of these and other R GUIs, subscribe to my blog, or follow me on twitter.