R-bloggers

If you plan to learn R or Python in the new year, book before the end of November. Our spring 2027 data science training courses run from January to June, and early bird pricing on the first one ends on 29 November. There are 22 courses on the sc...

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is quietly becoming one of the most useful ideas in AI tooling. Here, we describe what MCP is, why it matters, and how to build an MCP server yourself. MCP is a standard way to link a Large Language Model (LLM) to the outside world. ...

One of the fundamental aims of field experiments is to explorare the relationships between several experimental traits, which have been recorded/measured altogheter for all the experimental units. For example, think about a genotype experiment w...

The 1.4.0 release of maestro is out, and with it comes the ability to record custom metrics from your pipelines. Execution time and success/failure were already tracked, but there was no good way to answer questions like “how many rows did ...

Flow cytometry researchers have a growing collection of R and Bioconductor tools available to them. But for someone who is comfortable working with cytometry data and has little programming experience, knowing where to begin can be difficult. T...

When we have a multi-trait table of data, we might be interested in investigating variability structure and the reciprocal relationships (whether causal or non-causal) among variables. For example, let’s consider the ‘mtcars’ dataset, shown belo...

I recently updated nycdogs, a data package for R that I originally made for teaching purposes. It bundles up New York City’s dog licensing and dog bite datasets into an R package. The data is already provided by the city in a directly usable way ...

Data centers required to fuel the ambitions of Artificial Intelligence companies have sparked a nationwide conversation. AI companies are moving quickly to build out infrastructure and local communities are pushing back to resist what they see a...

In my last post on permute, I looked at ordered set partitions and the new formula interface for plots and blocks. This time I want to show two helpers for the next part of writing a permutation test: taking those permutations and doing something...

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...

In statistics, dependence or association is any statistical relationship, whether causal or not, between two random variables or bivariate data. It is often measured by the Pearson’s correlation coefficient: Other measures of correlation can be...

“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 ...