Which US city has the worst weather? To answer that question, data analyst Taras Kaduk counted the number of pleasant days in each city and ranked them accordingly. For this analysis, a "pleasant" day is one where the average temperature was in the range 55°F-75°F, the maximum was in ...

Below are links to my slides from my talk on Future: Friendly Parallel Processing in R for Everyone that I presented last month at the satRday Paris 2019 conference in Paris, France (February 23, 2019). My talk (32 slides; ~40 minutes): Title: F...

A new version of R package gower has just been released on CRAN. Thanks to our new contributor David Turner who was kind enough to provide a pull request, gower now also computes weighted gower distances. From the NEWS file: … Continue reading →

A side-by-bide comparison of R’s Shiny and Python’s Dash for building a simple web app. We’ll also discuss some of the unseen differences between the two that are important to consider before building a large scale app and deploying it.

A side-by-bide comparison of R’s Shiny and Python’s Dash for building a simple web app. We’ll also discuss some of the unseen differences between the two that are important to consider before building a large scale app and deploying it.

Back in 2013 I wrote a post that was titled, "Forecasting From Log-Linear Regressions". The basis for that post was the well-known result that if you estimate a linear regression model with the (natural) logarithm of y as the dependent variable, but you're actually interested in forecasting y itself, you don't ...

This is the fourth and final part in the series of articles on R vocabulary. In this series, we explore most of the functions mentioned in Chapter 2 of the book Advanced R. The first, second and third part of the series can be read here, here and here. In this ...

R is greatly benefiting from new users coming from disciplines that traditionally did not provoke much serious computation. Journalists1 and humanist scholars2, for example, are embracing R. But, does the avenue from the Humanities go both ways? In a recent conversation with Christian Westergaard, proprietor of Sophia Rare Books in ...

Recently one of my coworkers showed me a ggplot and although it is not wrong, it is also not ideal. Here is the TL:DR : Whenever you find yourself adding multiple geom_* to show different groups, reshape your data In software engineering there are things called antipatterns, ways of programming ...

Have you been feeling lately that you are missing out the coolest skill-set in academia? Here is you chance to cut in and dive into R. In July BaRacelona Summer School of Demography welcomes dedicated scholars, aspiring or established, to help th...

The 76th Tokyo R User Meetup happened on March 2nd, graciously hosted by DeNA (an entertainment and e-commerce company) in their lovely headquarters located in Shibuya. (Photo courtesy of Takashi Minoda) On this day anot...

After what seems like a lifetime (at least to me), a new feature release of ggforce is available on CRAN. ggforce is my general purpose extension package for ggplot2, my first early success, what got me on twitter in the first place, and ultimately instrumental in my career move towards ...

Landscape metrics are algorithms that quantify physical characteristics of landscape mosaics (aka categorical raster) in order to connect them to some ecological processes. Many different landscape metrics exist and they can provide three main levels of information: (i) landscape level, (ii) class level, and (iii) patch level. A landscape level ...

Fully saturated RGB rainbow colors are still widely used in scientific visualizations despite their widely-recognized disadvantages. A recent wild-caught example is presented, showing its limitations along with a better HCL-based alternative ...

Since, R and Python remain the most popular languages, it seems reasonable to debate which one is better. We'll evaluate the two languages in four categories: Data Visualization, Modelling Libraries, Ease of learning and Community support.