R-bloggers

What difference can a sponsored place on a bioinformatics course make? For some researchers, it means access to training they would otherwise struggle to afford. For others, it is an opportunity to explore a new field, work through unfamili...

I’ve been giving permute a bit of attention recently. Two additions should make it easier to set up permutation tests: an option for ordered set partitions, and formulas for specifying plots and blocks. That’s a rather grand name for the first ad...

“This original, thought-provoking, and transforming, book is much much more than an implementation manual for Bayesian Data Analysis, even though it shares almost the same perspective. (The first sentence of the book states that the authors’ `conceptions of statistical practice, and of Bayesian statistics, have changed over the years’.) By ...

On 15-17 September 2026, members of the Bioconductor, Galaxy and nf-core communities came together at The Open University in Milton Keynes for the BioFAIR Data to Discovery and BioFAIR Collaboration Fest (CoFest) joint event. The three-day event...

There has been an explosion of package/environment/platform managers in the R ecosystem recently,1 and R users are really reaping the rewards of so many ripe and riveting tools. But, I’ve found it rough2 to keep track of them all and understand ...

After 20 years of service the R-Forge package hosting platform will be retiring soon. Codeberg is a modern alternative that shares many of the ideas and values that R-Forge was built on. A tutorial for transitioning to Codeberg (or other Git-...

How much crude oil does the world have available? Inquiring minds want to know but it is surprisingly difficult to get a single number. We hear more about relative levels “less than at any point since XXXX” and changes “has dropped X million barrels in...

This post presents a function `mlReserve()` for machine-learning loss reserving on 'real-world' triangles, based on a fork of the 'ChainLadder' package. It includes two experiments, each scored against a known true reserve: (A) Two triangles from an individual-claims simulator (Wang & Wüthrich), embedded below: chain ladder vs mlReserve, in detail; (...

Pipeline setup {pipeflow} builds a pipeline by adding one R function per step with pip_add (see also the Get started article). In this post, we’ll work with the following toy pipeline: step load produces a sequence step clean doubles it step fit sums it, and step report formats ...

The North American Bioconductor Conference 2026 (([BioC2026])(https://bioc2026.bioconductor.org/)) took place from August 10-12, 2026, at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, Washington. The conference brought together researchers, dev...

Three hundred twenty-nine new packages were submitted to CRAN in July. Here are my Top 40 picks in nineteen categories: Agriculture, Artificial Intelligence, Climate Studies, Computational Methods, Ecology, Epidemiology, Genomics, Machine Learni...

In 2019 I wrote a post with seven reasons policy professionals should learn to code. Now that AI can write reasonable code, I’ve had a number of people ask me if it’s still worth learning to program. Based on the evidence I’ve seen, AI appears to be a ...