One hundred twenty-three new packages made it to CRAN in December. Here are my “Top 40” selections in nine categories: Computational Methods, Data, Genomics, Machine Learning, Medicine, Science, Statistics, Utilities, and Visualization. Computational Methods FKF.SP v0.1.0: Provides a fast and flexible Kalman filtering implementation utilizing sequential processing, designed for efficient ...

Andrea Luciani is a Technical Advisor for the Directorate General for Economics, Statistics and Research at the Bank of Italy, and co-author of the bimets package. Structural Equation Models (SEM), which are common in many economic modeli...

Waseem Medhat is a Statistical Programmer and Computational Experimentalist who resides in Alexandria, Egypt This post takes a closer look at the forest plot that was mentioned in a previous post introducing PSI’s Wonderful Wednesdays events. It describes a custom version of a forest plot with additional bands to ...

For almost a year now, the PSI Visualization Special Interest Group (VIS SIG) has been conducting a monthly graduate-level seminar on creating effective statistical visualizations that is open to everyone. Wonderful Wednesdays is a unique collegial event. Every month the SIG publishes a link to a new data set and ...

The world seems to have moved to a new phase of paying attention to COVID-19. We have gone from pondering daily plots of case counts, to puzzling through models and forecasts, and are now moving on to the vaccines and the science behind them. For data scientists, however, the focus ...

Two hundred ninety-two new packages made it to CRAN in November. Picking forty was unusually difficult. Nevertheless, here are my “Top 40” selections in twelve categories: Archaeology, Computational Methods, Data, Epidemiology, Games, Machine Learning, Mathematics, Medicine, Statistics, Time Series, Utilities, and Visualization. R developers continue to extend the reach of R. ...

In this post, I’d like to review some basic options for plotting three dimensional surfaces in R. In addition to producing some eye catching visualizations, plotting surfaces can also help develop one’s geometric intui...

If you haven’t explored the RStudio website in a while, your next visit may include a pleasant surprise. I recently went to the Tidymodels page, just to see what was new and was immediately drawn into the new landscape imagined by the RStudio education team. Clicking on Get Started ...

We are in the middle of a mind-boggling natural experiment here in the United States. In spite of the advice from the CDC and dire warnings from our nation’s health care experts, millions of Americans will travel over the long holiday weekend. Although the number of people flying is ...

One hundred fifty-six new packages made it to CRAN in October. Here are my “Top 40” selections in eight categories: Computational Methods, Data, Epidemiology, Mathematics, Machine Learning, Statistics, Utilities, and Visualization. Computational Methods mcmcensemble v 2.0: Provides ensemble samplers for affine-invariant Monte Carlo Markov Chain algorithms which allow a faster convergence for ...

In two recent posts, one on the Disease Progression Model and the other on Fake Data, I highlighted some of R's tools for simulating data that exhibit desired correlations and other statistical properties. In this post, I’ll focus on a sma...

Two hundred thirty-six new packages made it to CRAN in September. Here are my “Top 40” picks in eleven categories: Computational Methods, Data, Finance, Genomics, Machine Learning, Mathematics, Medicine, Statistics, Time Series, Utilities and Visualization. The large number of packages and, in my opinion, the high percentage of high quality work ...

The Delphi epidemiological forecasting group at Carnegie Mellon University is undertaking a massive effort to develop leading indicators for COVID-19 outbreaks, and if you are an R or Python developer you can help. Delphi is working with both Facebook and Google to analyze the data from daily surveys that ask ...

In a previous post, I showed some examples of simulating fake data from a few packages that are useful for common simulation tasks and indicated that I would be following up with a look at simulating survival data. A tremendous amount of wo...

In this final post of the six part series on R package integration with modern reusable C++ Code using Rcpp, we will look at providing documentation for an R package. To review, we previously covered the following topics: Installation and ...

Jay Ulfelder, PhD, serves as Program Manager for the Nonviolent Action Lab, part of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He has used R to work at the intersection of social science and data science for nearly two decades. Where are people in the ...