In this post, I describe a recent case where I used rlang’s tidy evaluation system to do some data-cleaning. This example is not particularly involved, but it demonstrates is a basic but powerful idea: That we can capture the expressions that a user...

In this post, I demonstrate a few techniques for plotting information from a relatively simple mixed-effects model fit in R. These plots can help us develop intuitions about what these models are doing and what “partial pooling” means. The sleeps...

Last week, I released a new package called polypoly to CRAN. It wraps up some common tasks for dealing with orthogonal polynomials into a single package. The README shows off the main functionality, as well as the neat “logo” I made for the packag...

A few days ago, I watched a terrific lecture by Bob Carpenter on Bayesian models. He started with a Bayesian approach to Fisher’s exact test. I had never heard of this classical procedure, so I was curious to play with the example. In this post, I use the same ...

Pokémon Go is an augmented reality game where people with smartphones walk around and catch Pokémon. As in the classic games, players are Pokémon “trainers” who have to travel around and collect creatures. Some types are rarer than others, som...

A colleague of mine sent me the following R question: I have a function that takes a list and does some stuff to it and then returns it. I then take that output and run it through the same function again. But I obviously don’t want to repeatedly ...

As part of my tutorial talk on RStanARM, I presented some examples of how to visualize the uncertainty in Bayesian linear regression models. This post is an expanded demonstration of the approaches I presented in that tutorial. Data: Does brain mass predict how much mammals sleep in a day? Let’...

The lazyeval package is a tool-set for performing nonstandard evaluation in R. Nonstandard evaluation refers to any situation where something special happens with how user input or code is evaluated. For example, the library function doesn’t evalua...