by Andrie de Vries I am pleased to announce that we have released a new version of the checkpoint package to CRAN. The goal of checkpoint is to solve the problem of package reproducibility in R. Easy reproducible workflow using checkpoint() We first announced checkpoint and the Reproducible R Toolkit ... [Read more...]

by Andrie de Vries Just more than a year ago I cobbled together some code to work with the (then) new version of Google Sheets. You can still find my musings and code at the blog post Reading data from the new version of Google Spreadsheets. Since then, Jennifer Bryan (@... [Read more...]

by Andrie de Vries A few days ago I received an unexpected parcel in my letterbox. To my delight, it turned out to be a translation into Simplified Chinese of R for Dummies, co-authored by myself and Joris Meys. Let me clarify: Joris and I wrote the book, but were ... [Read more...]

by Andrie de Vries This week at JSM2015, the annual conference of the American Statistical Association, Joseph Rickert and I gave a presentation on the topic of "The network structure of CRAN and BioConductor" (link to abstract). Our work tested the hypothesis if one can detect statistical differences in the ... [Read more...]

by Andrie de Vries In a previous post, I used page rank and community structure to create a plot of CRAN. This plot used vibrant colours to allow us to see some of the underlying structure of CRAN. However, much of this structure was still obfuscated by the amount of ... [Read more...]

by Andrie de Vries Last week, IEEE Spectrum said R rised to #6 in Top Programming languages. They use a weighted methodology of 12 factors to compute their score. Among these factors is the activity on social programming websites, including StackOverflow and Github. I recently used data.stackexchange.com to query the ... [Read more...]

by Andrie de Vries My experience of UseR!2015 drew to an end shortly after I gave a Kaleidoscope presentation discussing "The Network Structure of CRAN". My talk drew heavily on two previous blog posts, Finding the essential R packages using the pagerank algorithm and Finding clusters of CRAN packages using ... [Read more...]

by Andrie de Vries Today is the first day of UseR!2015 conference in Aalborg in Northern Denmark. But yesterday was a day packed with 16 tutorials on a range of interesting topics. I submitted a proposal many months ago to run a session on using R in Hadoop and was very ... [Read more...]

by Andrie de Vries In my previous post, I demonstrated how to get some status of running jobs on a parallel back end. However, I stopped short of actually demonstrating progress bars. In this post I demonstrate how to do this. The StackOverflow question How do you create a progress ... [Read more...]

by Andrie de Vries R has strong support for parallel programming, both in base R and additional CRAN packages. For example, we have previously written about foreach and parallel programming in the articles Tutorial: Parallel programming with foreach and Intro to Parallel Random Number Generation with RevoScaleR. The foreach package ... [Read more...]

by Andrie de Vries During October 2014 we announced RRT (the Reproducible R Toolkit) that consists of the checkpoint package and the MRAN. In January, David Smith followed up with another post about reproducibility using Revolution R Open. Since then, we've had several requests for new features and enhancements. The development ... [Read more...]

by Andrie de Vries Last week we announced the availability of Revolution R Open, an enhanced distribution of R. One of the enhancements is the inclusion of high performance linear algebra libraries, specifically the Intel MKL. This library significantly speeds up many statistical calculations, e.g. the matrix algebra that ... [Read more...]

The ability to create reproducible research is an important topic for many users of R. So important, that several groups in the R community have tackled this problem. Notably, packrat from RStudio, and gRAN from Genentech (see our previous blog post). The Reproducible R Toolkit is a new open-source initiative ... [Read more...]

by Andrie deVries One of the reasons that R is so popular is the CRAN archive of useful packages. However, with more than 5,900 packages on CRAN, many organisations need to maintain a private mirror of CRAN with only a subset of packages that are relevant to them. The package miniCRAN ... [Read more...]

by Andrie de Vries In my previous post I wrote about how to identify and visualize package dependencies. Within hours, Duncan Murdoch (member of R-core) identified some discrepancies between my list of dependencies and the visualisation. Since then, I fixed the dispecrancies. In this blog post I attempt to clarify ... [Read more...]

With the growing popularity of R, there is an associated increase in the popularity of online forums to ask questions. One of the most popular sites is StackOverflow, where more than 60 thousand questions have been asked and tagged to be related to R. On the same page, you can also ... [Read more...]

Spreadsheets remain an important way for people to share and work with data. Among other providers, Google has provided the ability to create online spreadsheets and other documents. Back in 2009, David Smith posted a blog entry on how to use R, and specifically the XML package to import data from ... [Read more...]

by Andrie de Vries Prior to joining Revolution Analytics in March this year, I spent several years in the field of market research and survey analytics. During this period, I spent a few months consulting to a digital marketing agency based in London. My role was to help build their ... [Read more...]