Our interference from then environment issue was a bit subtle. But there are variations that can be a bit more insidious. Please consider the following. library("dplyr") # unrelated value that happens # to be in our environment z % select(-z) # x y # … Continue reading A Better Example of the Confused By ... [Read more...]

It is no great secret: I like value oriented interfaces that preserve referential transparency. It is the side of the public debate I take in R programming. "One of the most useful properties of expressions is that called by Quine referential transparency. In essence this means that if we wish ... [Read more...]

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We recently saw a great recurring R question: “how do you use one column to choose a different value for each row?” That is: how do you use a column as an index? Please read on for some idiomatic base R, data.table, and dplyr solutions. Let’s say we ... [Read more...]

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One thing that is sure to get lost in my long note on macros in R is just how concise and powerful macros are. The problem is macros are concise, but they do a lot for you. So you get bogged down when you explain the joke. Let’s try ... [Read more...]

I’ve been thinking a bit on “competition” in the R ecosystem. I guess the closest I can come to a fair and coherent view on “competition” in the R ecosystem is some variation of the following. I, of course, should not be treating things as a competition. We are ... [Read more...]

Our R package wrapr supplies a "piping operator" that we feel is a real improvement in R code piped-style coding. The idea is: with wrapr‘s "dot arrow" pipe "%.__%" the expression "A %.__% B" is treated very much like "{. % B(.)" as a … Continue reading Better R Code with wrapr Dot Arrow [Read more...]

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R users who also use the dplyr package will be able to quickly understand the following code that adds an estimated area column to a data.frame. suppressPackageStartupMessages(library("dplyr")) iris %__% mutate( ., Petal.Area = (pi/4)*Petal.Width*Petal.Length) %__% head(.) ## Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species Petal.... [Read more...]

If your R or dplyr work is taking what you consider to be a too long (seconds instead of instant, or minutes instead of seconds, or hours instead of minutes, or a day instead of an hour) then try data.table. For some tasks data.table is routinely faster than ... [Read more...]

R tip : how to pass a formula to lm(). Often when modeling in R one wants to build up a formula outside of the modeling call. This allows the set of columns being used to be passed around as a vector of strings, and treated as data. Being able to ... [Read more...]

Today’s R tip is: put your values in columns. Some R users use different seemingly clever tricks to bring data to an analysis. Here is an (artificial) example. chamber_sizes [Read more...]

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Some more Practical Data Science with R news. Practical Data Science with R is the book we wish we had when we started in data science. Practical Data Science with R, Second Edition is the revision of that book with the packages we wish had been available at that time (... [Read more...]

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