Articles by Andrie de Vries

New features in the checkpoint package, version 0.4.0

April 13, 2017 | Andrie de Vries

by Andrie de Vries In 2014 we introduced the checkpoint package for reproducible research. This package makes it easy to use R package versions that existed on CRAN at a given date in the past, and to use varying package versions with different projects. Previous blog posts include: Introducing the Reproducible ... [Read more...]

A segmented model of CRAN package growth

April 27, 2016 | Andrie de Vries

by Andrie de Vries A few weeks ago I wrote about the growth of CRAN packages, where I demonstrated how to scrape CRAN archives to get an estimate of the number of packages over time. In this post I briefly mentioned that the Ecdat package contains a dataset, CRANpackages, with ... [Read more...]

On the growth of CRAN packages

April 15, 2016 | Andrie de Vries

by Andrie de Vries Every once in a while somebody asks me how many packages are on CRAN. (More than 8,000 in April, 2016). A year ago, in April 2015, there were ~6,200 packages on CRAN. This poses a second question: what is the historical growth of CRAN packages? One source of information is ... [Read more...]

Embedding images in R package help pages

December 23, 2015 | Andrie de Vries

by Andrie de Vries Have you noticed that most R help does not contain any images? Historically, this was for a good reason: most programming language help assumes that you use the system on a text-only system, e.g. a headless linux server. If your system has no graphical capabilities, ... [Read more...]

Securely storing your secrets in R code

December 16, 2015 | Andrie de Vries

by Andrie de Vries Last month I wrote about How to store and use webservice keys and authentication details, a summary of the options mentioned in a twitter discussion started by Jennifer Bryan. All of the options in my article really stored the secrets in plain text somewhere on your ... [Read more...]

Updates to the foreach package and its friends

October 21, 2015 | Andrie de Vries

By Andrie de Vries Earlier this month Rich Calaway, programme manager at Microsoft and maintainer of the foreach package, published some updates to the foreach suite of packages, including: foreach iterators doMC doParallel doSNOW Most of the changes were cosmetic, or to conform to CRAN policy. However, the last two ... [Read more...]

Parameters and percentiles (the gamma distribution)

October 7, 2015 | Andrie de Vries

by Andrie de Vries In one of John D. Cooke's blog posts of 2010 (Parameters and Percentiles), he poses the following problem: The doctor says 10% of patients respond within 30 days of treatment and 80% respond within 90 days of treatment. Now go turn that into a probability distribution. That’s a common task ... [Read more...]

Using miniCRAN on site in Iran

October 6, 2015 | Andrie de Vries

by Jens Carl Streibig, Professor Emeritus at University of Copenhagen Editor's introduction: for background on the miniCRAN package, see our previous blog posts: Introducing miniCRAN Using R in Myanmar MiniCRAN saves my neck when out in regions where seamless running internet is and exception rather than the rule. R is ... [Read more...]

Interpolation and smoothing functions in base R

September 23, 2015 | Andrie de Vries

by Andrie de Vries Every once in a while I try to remember how to do interpolation using R. This is not something I do frequently in my workflow, so I do the usual sequence of finding the appropriate help page: ?interpolate Help pages: stats::approx Interpolation Functions stats::NLSstClosestX ... [Read more...]
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