Writing functions that take data frame columns as arguments is a problem that most R users have been confronted with at some point. There are different ways to tackle this issue, and this blog post will focus on the solution provided by the latest release of the {rlang} package. You ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

I have recently been confronted to a kind of data set and problem that I was not even aware existed: intermittent demand data. Intermittent demand arises when the demand for a certain good arrives sporadically. Let’s take a look at an example, by analyzing the number of downloads for ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

Lately I’ve been interested in trying to cluster documents, and to find similar documents based on their contents. In this blog post, I will use Seneca’s Moral letters to Lucilius and compute the pairwise cosine similarity of his 124 letters. Computing the cosine similarity between two vectors returns how ... [Read more...]

The creation of this blog post was prompted by this tweet, asking an age-old question: @spacemacs— Bruno Rodrigues (@brodriguesco) May 16, 2019 This is actually a very important question, that I have been asking myself for a long time. An IDE, and plain text editors, are a very important tools to anyone ... [Read more...]

The creation of this blog post was prompted by this tweet, asking an age-old question: @spacemacs— Bruno Rodrigues (@brodriguesco) May 16, 2019 This is actually a very important question, that I have been asking myself for a long time. An IDE, and plain text editors, are a very important tools to anyone ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

Today I’ve removed my system’s R package and installed MRO instead. While re-installing all packages, I’ve encountered one of the most frustrating error message for someone installing packages from source:

Error : /tmp/Rtmpw60aCp/R.INSTALL7819efef27e/xml2/man/read_xml.Rd:47: unable to load shared object
'/usr/lib64/R/library/xml2/libs/xml2.so': 
libicui18n.so.58: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory ERROR: 
installing Rd objects failed for package ‘xml2’

This library, libicui18n.so.58 is a pain in the butt. However, you can easily install ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

I am currently working on a package for the R programming language; its initial goal was to simply distribute the data used in the Card and Krueger 1994 paper that you can read here (PDF warning). However, I decided that I would add code to perform diff-in-diff. In my previous blog ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

I am currently working on a package for the R programming language; its initial goal was to simply distribute the data used in the Card and Krueger 1994 paper that you can read here (PDF warning). The gist of the paper is to try to answer the following question: Do increases ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

I have been playing around with historical newspapers data for some months now. The “obvious” type of analysis to do is NLP, but there is also a lot of numerical data inside historical newspapers. For instance, you can find these tables that show the market prices of the day in ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

In this blog post I’m going to show you how you can extract text from scanned pdf files, or pdf files where no text recognition was performed. (For pdfs where text recognition was performed, you can read my other blog post). The pdf I’m going to use can ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

There’s a lot going on in the development version of {tidyr}. New functions for pivoting data frames, pivot_wide() and pivot_long() are coming, and will replace the current functions, spread() and gather(). spread() and gather() will remain in the package though: You may have heard a rumour that ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]