Three weeks ago, I saw a nice mechanical recreation of a PCA (or total least squares) on Twitter: just by pulling some strings attached to a straw. Some days ago, Joshua Loftus published Least squares as springs, where the author presents some nice visualisations, and explains that the cost function ... [Read more...]

The constants package contains CODATA internationally recommended values of the fundamental physical constants, provided as symbols for direct use within the R language. Optionally, the values with uncertainties and/or units are also provided if the errors, units and/or quantities packages are installed. The Committee on Data for Science ... [Read more...]

In our last post, we presented the FlexiBLAS library, coming to Fedora 33, and the accompanying flexiblas R package, which enables live switching of the BLAS backend among the various open source options readily available in the Fedora repositories. In this post, we demonstrate how to install, register with FlexiBLAS, and ... [Read more...]

BLAS and LAPACK comprise all the low-level linear algebra subroutines that handle your matrix operations in R and other software. Fedora ships the reference implementation from Netlib, which is accurate and stable, but slow, as well as several optimized backends, such as ATLAS, BLIS (serial, OpenMP and threaded versions) and ... [Read more...]

Bringing R packages to Fedora (in fact, to any distro) is an Herculean task, especially considering the rate at which CRAN grows nowadays. So I am happy to announce the cran2copr project, which is an attempt to maintain binary RPM repos for most of CRAN (~15k packages as of ... [Read more...]

The 4.4.0 release of simmer, the Discrete-Event Simulator for R, is on CRAN. This update stabilises a new pace of a couple of new releases per year, which is more appropriate given the maturity that the project has reached. This release brings us a dozen bug fixes and improvements, including the ... [Read more...]

The 4.3.0 release of simmer, the Discrete-Event Simulator for R, is on CRAN. Along with this update, we are very glad to announce that our homonymous paper finally appeared in the Journal of Statistical Software. Please, use the following reference for citations (see citation("simmer")): Ucar I, Smeets B, Azcorra A (2019). “... [Read more...]

The 4.2.1 release of simmer, the Discrete-Event Simulator for R, is on CRAN with quite interesting new features and fixes. As discussed in the mailing list, there is a way to handle the specific case in which an arrival is rejected because a queue is full: library(simmer) reject % log_("kicked ... [Read more...]

The 4.1.0 release of simmer, the Discrete-Event Simulator for R, is on CRAN. As per request in the mailing list, now get_global() is able to work inside a generator function. Moreover, the new add_global() method attaches a global attribute to a simulator. library(simmer) env % set_global("interarrival", 1, mod="+") ... [Read more...]

The 4.0.1 release of simmer, the Discrete-Event Simulator for R, is on CRAN since a couple of weeks ago. There are few changes, notably new getters (get_sources(), get_resources(), get_trajectory()) for simmer environments and some improvements in resource selection policies (see details in help(select)). A new convenience function, ... [Read more...]

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The latest R tip in Win-Vector Blog encourages you to Use Radix Sort based on a simple benchmark showing a x35 speedup compared to the default method, but with no further explanation. In my opinion, though, the complete tip would be, instead, use radix sort… if you know what you ... [Read more...]

If you are a user who needs to work with Rcpp-based packages, or you are a maintainer of one of such packages, you may be interested in the recent development of the unwind API, which can be leveraged to boost performance since the last Rcpp update. In a nutshell, until ... [Read more...]

The 4.0.0 release of simmer, the Discrete-Event Simulator for R, is on CRAN under a new license: we decided to switch to GPL __= 2. Most notably in this major release, the C++ core has been refactorised and exposed under inst/include. This is not a big deal for most users, but it ... [Read more...]

Compatibility with different workflows R base Tidyverse A note on data.table Future directions of units and errors Next steps [view raw Rmd] This is the third blog post on quantities, an R-Consortium funded pro... [Read more...]

The 3.8.0 release of simmer, the Discrete-Event Simulator for R, hit CRAN almost a week ago, and Windows binaries are already available. This version includes two highly requested new features that justify this second consecutive minor release. Attachment of precomputed data Until v3.7.0, the generator was the only means to attach ... [Read more...]

Reporting quantities Parsing quantities A flexible errors parser Unit parsing Summary Next steps [view raw Rmd] This is the second blog post on quantities, an R-Consortium funded project for quantity calculus with ... [Read more...]

The 3.7.0 release of simmer, the Discrete-Event Simulator for R, is on CRAN. It includes several API improvements and bug fixes. Among the former, the new timeout_from_attribute() activity makes it easier and more efficient the common task of placing a timeout based on a previously set attribute. Another common ... [Read more...]

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Of course, I’m paraphrasing Dirk’s fifteenth post in the rarely rational R rambling series: #15: Tidyverse and data.table, sitting side by side … (Part 1). I very much liked it, because, although I’m a happy tidyverse user, I’m always trying not to be tied into that verse too ... [Read more...]