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 ...

This week, members of the Bay Area useR Group (BARUG) celebrated the group’s one hundred and first meetup with beer, pizza and three outstanding presentations at the cancer diagnostics company GRAIL. Pete Mohanty began the evening with the talk Did “Communities in Crisis” Elect Trump?: An Analysis with Kernel ...

Last week, I had the opportunity to talk to a group of Master’s level Statistics and Business Analytics students at Cal State East Bay about R and Data Science. Many in my audience were adult students coming back to school with job experience writing code in Java, Python and ...

Here are my picks for the “Top 40” new packages submitted to CRAN in April 2017. These selections, which were culled from 208 submissions, are organized into four categories: Data, Finance, Statistics and Utilities. The number of entries in the Data and Utilities categories reflect the initiatives of R developers to connect to ...

One of the most valuable things I have learned working on Data for Democracy’s Medicare drug spending project has been the value of collaborative tools. It has been my first in-depth experience using Github collaboratively, for one, but it has also introduced me to data.world. data.world is ...

In a previous post, I introduced DataFest and how one can streamline the organization of this event using Google Forms and tools from the tidyverse. In this post, I’ll walk through building a Shiny app that demonstrates the growth of DataFest over the years, both in terms of host ...

In the crowded market space of data science and R language books, Lovelace and Gillespie’s Efficient R Programming (2016) stands out from the crowd. Over the course of ten comprehensive chapters, the authors address the primary tenets of developing efficient R programs. Unless you happen to be a member of ...