Two hundred and twenty-four new packages were added to CRAN in July. Below are my picks for the “Top 40” packages arranged in eight categories: Machine Learning, Science, Statistics, Numerical Methods, Statistics, Time Series, Utilities and Visualizations. Science and Numerical Methods are categories that I have not used before. The idea ...

Introduction Dynamic systems are usually represented by a model before they can be analyzed computationally. These dynamic systems are systems that change, evolve or have their states altered or varied with time based on a set of defined rules. Dynamic systems could be mechanical, electrical, electronic, biological, sociological, and so ...

This example groups stocks together in a network that highlights associations within and between the groups using only historical price data. The result is far from ground-breaking; you can already guess the output. For the most part, the stocks get grouped together into pretty obvious business sectors. Despite the obvious ...

Editor’s Note: The 2017 Chapman University DataFest was held during the weekend of April 21-23. The 2018 DataFest will be held during the weekend of April 27-29. DataFest was founded by Rob Gould in 2011 at UCLA with 40 students. In just seven years, it has grown to 31 sites in three countries. Have ...

The Challenge Visualizations are one of R’s strengths. There are many functions and packages that create complex plots, often with one simple command. These plotting functions do two things: first, they take the raw data and run the calculations needed for a given visualization, and second, they draw the ...

ggplot2 is kind of a household word for R users. I’ve ended up using it for complex data munging and wrangling work, where I needed to get clarity on different aspects of the data, especially being able to get different views, slices and dices of it, but in a ...

Judging from the number of JSM talks that incorporated interactive visualizations of some sort or another, it appears that interactive graphics have captured the attention of a good many statisticians. I found this a little surprising. Statisticians, on the whole, are not easily impressed by “eye candy”, and I believe ...

Baltimore has the reputation of being a tough town: hot in the summer and gritty, but the convention center hosting the Joint Statistical Meetings is a pretty cool place to be. There are thousands of people here and so many sessions (over 600) that it’s just impossible to get an ...

Two hundred and thirty-eight new packages were added to CRAN in June. Below are my picks for the “Top 40”, organized into six categories: Biostatistics, Data, Machine Learning, Miscellaneous, Statistics and Utilities. Some packages, including geofacet and secret, already seem to be gaining traction. Biostatistics BIGL v1.0.1: Implements response surface methods ...

The R Consortium is undertaking a multi-year effort to survey the whole R world. In a rather low-key blog post at the end of last month, the R Consortium’s technical committee, the Infrastructure Steering Committee (ISC), launched its prototype survey of R users. The idea is to use the ...

Introduction Control theory is an interdisciplinary branch of mathematics and engineering that has the objective of controlling physical systems. A control system is a device or a collection of devices that manage, command, direct or regulate the behavior of other devices or systems. Control systems engineering is a major application ...

Shiny applications of all stripes (including flexdashboard with runtime Shiny) are revolutionary in that they put the power of R directly in the end user’s hands without needing to interact directly with the language. A common way end-users wish to interact with their data is via a dashboard that ...

Two hundred and twenty-nine new packages were submitted to CRAN in May. Here are my picks for the “Top 40”, organized into five categories: Data, Data Science and Machine Learning, Education, Miscellaneous, Statistics and Utilities. Data angstroms v0.0.1: Provides helper functions for working with Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS) output. bikedata ...

Analytic administrator is a role that data scientists assume when they onboard new tools, deploy solutions, support existing standards, or train other data scientists. It is a role that works closely with IT to maintain, upgrade, and scale analytic environments. Analytic admins have a multiplier effect - as they go ...