September was another relatively slow month for new package activity on CRAN: “only” 126 new packages by my count. My Top 40 list is heavy on what I characterize as “utilities”: packages that either extend R in some fashion or make it easier to do things in R. This month, the packages ...

It’s no secret that there are few industries more competitive than the pharmaceutical industry. Big money placed on long-shot bets for block-buster drugs where being first makes all the difference means a constant struggle to gain a competitive edge. So, you might find it surprising that the inaugural R / ...

Package developers relaxed a bit in August.; only 160 new packages went to CRAN that month. Here are my “Top 40” picks organized into seven categories: Data, Machine Learning, Science, Statistics, Time Series, Utilities, and Visualization. Data nsapi v0.1.1: Provides an interface to the Nederlandse Spoorwegen (Dutch Railways) API, allowing users to ...

I wish this post existed when I was struggling to add interactive plots to my Shiny app. I was mainly focused on recreating functionality found in other “dashboarding” applications. When looking for options, I found that htmlwidgets were the closest to what companies usually expect. However, while they are great ...

Today, we will look at the GDP data that is released every quarter or so by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), and get familiar with the BEA API (see the documentation here). For a primer on GDP in general, BEA publishes this guide. To access the BEA API, we ...

Why is this about trucks? Last month, at the R/Pharma conference that took place on the Harvard Campus, I presented bioWARP, a large Shiny application containing more than 500,000 lines of code. Although several other Shiny apps were presented at the conference, I noticed that none of them came close ...

In the previous post, we introduced plumber as a way to expose R processes and programs to external systems via REST API endpoints. In this post, we’ll go further by building out an API that powers a Slack slash command, all from within R using plumber. A subsequent post ...

July was a big month for submitting new packages to CRAN; by my count, 251 unique and truly new packages were accepted. In addition to quantity, I was pleased to see quality and variety. For instance, tropicalSparse, a package for exploring some abstract mathematics, and eChem, a package for teaching analytical ...

It all starts with sandboxes. Development sandboxes are dedicated safe spaces for experimentation and creativity. A sandbox is a place where you can go to test and break things, without the ramifications of breaking the real, important things. If you’re an analytic administrator who doesn’t have access or ...

Last month, I was delighted to be invited to speak, along with Hadley Wickham, at the seventy-first meeting of the TokyoR user group in Tokyo, Japan. This day-long mini-conference attracted more than 200 attendees and featured 16 talks that covered a wide range of topics, including two near-real-time analyses of World Cup ...

Today, in honor of last week’s jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), we will visualize jobs data with ggplot2 and then, more extensively with highcharter. Our aim is to explore highcharter and its similarity with ggplot and to create some nice interactive visualizations. In the process, ...

Approximately 144 new packages stuck to CRAN in June. That fact that 31 of these are specialized to particular scientific disciplines or analyses provides some evidence to my hypothesis that working scientists are actively adopting R. Below are my Top 40 picks for June, organized into the categories of Computational Methods, Data, Data ...

JSM 2018 is almost here! Usually around this time, I comb through the entire program manually making an itinerary for myself. But this year I decided to try something new – a programmatic way of going through the program, and then building a Shiny app that helps me better navigate the online ...

Moving R resources from development to production can be a challenge, especially when the resource isn’t something like a shiny application or rmarkdown document that can be easily published and consumed. Consider, as an example, a customer success model created in R. This model is responsible for taking customer ...

In our first blog post, we introduced CVXR, an R package for disciplined convex optimization, and showed how to model and solve a non-negative least squares problem using its interface. This time, we will tackle a non-parametric estimation example, which features new atoms as well as more complex constraints. Direct ...

In previous posts, we covered how to run a Monte Carlo simulation and how to visualize the results. Today, we will wrap that work into a Shiny app wherein a user can build a custom portfolio, and then choose a number of simulations to run and a number of months ...

Writing a domain-specific language (DSL) is a powerful and fairly common method for extending the R language. Both ggplot2 and dplyr, for example, are DSLs. (See Hadley’s chapter in Advanced R for some elaboration.) In this post, I take a first look at NIMBLE (Numerical Inference for Statistical Models ...

While looking over the 215 or so new packages that made it to CRAN in May, I was delighted to find several packages devoted to subjects a little bit out of the ordinary; for instance, bioacoustics analyzes audio recordings, freegroup looks at some abstract mathematics, RQEntangle computes quantum entanglement, stemmatology analyzes ...