Yesterday, at the last meeting of the Hamburg R User Group in this year, I had the pleasure to give a talk about Bayesian modelling and choosing (informative) priors in the rstanarm-package. You can download the slides of my talk here. Thanks to the Stan team and Tristan for proof ... [Read more...]

During the last year I’ve been working on a daily basis with phylogenetic trees, objects that in graph jargon are called Directed Acyclic Graphs. While R does have some cool packages out there to visualize these–including phylocanvas which looks great!–I wanted to tryout jsPhyloSVG, and moreover, to ... [Read more...]

Why this post? Currently, my team and I are building a Shiny app that serves as an interface for a forecasting model. The app allows business users to interact with predictions. However, we keep getting feature requests, such as, “Can we please have... [Read more...]

Recently I wanted to download all the transcripts of a podcast (600+ episodes). The transcripts are simple txt files so in a way I am not even ‘web’-scraping but just reading in 600 or so text files which is not really a big deal. I thought... [Read more...]

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Why this post? Currently, my team and I are building a Shiny app that serves as an interface for a forecasting model. The app allows business users to interact with predictions. However, we keep getting feature requests, such as, “Can we please have... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from November of particular interest to R users. R 3.4.3 "Kite Eating Tree" has been released. Several approaches for generating a "Secret Santa" list with R. The "RevoScaleR" package from Microsoft R Server has now been ported to Python. The call for ... [Read more...]

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Another RcppArmadillo release hit CRAN today. Since our last 0.8.100.1.0 release in October, Conrad kept busy and produced Armadillo releases 8.200.0, 8.200.1, 8.300.0 and now 8.300.1. We tend to now package these (with proper reverse-dependency checks and all) first for the RcppCore drat repo from where you can install them "as usual" (see the repo ... [Read more...]

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The British Ecological Society has published a new volume in their Guides to Better Science series: A Guide to Reproducible Code in Ecology and Evolution (pdf). The introduction, by , describes its scope: A Guide to Reproducible Code covers all the basic tools and information you will need to start making ... [Read more...]

Yesterday at ML Conference, which took place this year for the first time, I had a talk on cool bits of calculus and linear algebra that are useful and fun to know if you’re writing code for deep learning and/or machine learning. Originally, the title was something like “... [Read more...]

In our last article we pointed out a dangerous silent result corruption we have seen when using the R dplyr package with databases. To systematically avoid this result corruption we suggest breaking up your dplyr::mutate() statements to be dependency-free (not assigning the same value twice, and not using any ... [Read more...]

Recently, I was thinking about energy, solar energy, and battery technology, and I got curious about sources of lithium (which is used in batteries and related tech). Using a few tools from R, I created a map of lithium production within about 15 minutes. Here, I'll show you how I did ... [Read more...]

Downloading Annual Financial Reports and Corporate Events from B3 (formerly Bovespa) - Financial statements of companies traded at B3 (formerly Bovespa), the Brazilian stock exchange, are available in its website. Accessing the da... [Read more...]