December 2011 issue of the R Journal: An overview

The December 2011 issue of the R Journal is now available for download. Three times a year, the open-access journal of the R project publishes peer-reviewed articles on research and applications of R and R packages. As of the latest issue, all articles are published under a Creative Commons license, making them accessible for translation, academic and commercial uses with attribution.

As always, this latest issue includes several interesting and useful articles about R, including:

• How to add classification and regression tree functionality to Microsoft Excel, making use of R's rpart function and the RExcel add-in for Excel.
• An overview of the glm2 package, an alternative to the standard glm function for problems with tricky convergence properties.
• Using R to spellcheck natural language documents (useful as a preprocessing step in text analysis).
• Using the GoogleVis package to create interactive motion charts, time series charts, tree maps and geographic maps from R data. (This is the package used by Lloyd's of London for the Statistics Related to Lloyd's on-line application.)
• GrapheR, a GUI for drawing customizable and high-quality statistical charts (without needing to program in R).
• The R package "rainbow" for visualizing functional data (where every "data point" is a continuous curve), like the "functional bagplot" shown below.
• Writing portable C++ code for R packages to run on multiple platforms.
• And articles on Sweave and DOCSTRIP, optimal k-means clustering, and nonparametric goodness-of-fit tests.

"Functional Bagplot" generated by the rainbow package

This issue also includes news from the BioConductor project, a report on R's participation in the Google Summer of Code, a review of the useR! 2011 user conference and a preview of useR! 2012. 

Many thanks to Heather Turner, who served as Editor in Chief of the R Journal in 2011 and oversaw its transition from R-news. Martyn Plummer takes the one-year term for 2012. Thanks also to Peter Dalgaard who has served on the editorial board for four years; his seat will now be held by Deepayan Sarkar.

The R Journal: Volume 3/2, December 2011