R-bloggers

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 ...

After 20 years of service the R-Forge package hosting platform will be retiring soon. Codeberg is a modern alternative that shares many of the ideas and values that R-Forge was built on. A tutorial for transitioning to Codeberg (or other Git-...

How much crude oil does the world have available? Inquiring minds want to know but it is surprisingly difficult to get a single number. We hear more about relative levels “less than at any point since XXXX” and changes “has dropped X million barrels in...

This post presents a function `mlReserve()` for machine-learning loss reserving on 'real-world' triangles, based on a fork of the 'ChainLadder' package. It includes two experiments, each scored against a known true reserve: (A) Two triangles from an individual-claims simulator (Wang & Wüthrich), embedded below: chain ladder vs mlReserve, in detail; (...

Pipeline setup {pipeflow} builds a pipeline by adding one R function per step with pip_add (see also the Get started article). In this post, we’ll work with the following toy pipeline: step load produces a sequence step clean doubles it step fit sums it, and step report formats ...

The North American Bioconductor Conference 2026 (([BioC2026])(https://bioc2026.bioconductor.org/)) took place from August 10-12, 2026, at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, Washington. The conference brought together researchers, dev...

Three hundred twenty-nine new packages were submitted to CRAN in July. Here are my Top 40 picks in nineteen categories: Agriculture, Artificial Intelligence, Climate Studies, Computational Methods, Ecology, Epidemiology, Genomics, Machine Learni...

In 2019 I wrote a post with seven reasons policy professionals should learn to code. Now that AI can write reasonable code, I’ve had a number of people ask me if it’s still worth learning to program. Based on the evidence I’ve seen, AI appears to be a ...

I am one of those old guys who still uses variance-stabilising transformations when data do not conform to the basic assumptions of ANOVA. Indeed, apart from counts and proportions, where GLMs are extremely useful, I have not yet found a simpler...

I had a lot of fun this morning, brainstorming and assembling this _Analytics Pipeline_ for Dashboards with Claude (and yes it takes much, much more than only 10 prompts).

There are ten public training courses left in 2026, running through October and November. If you’ve been meaning to learn Python, build your first Shiny app, or get to grips with machine learning in R, there’s still time to do it befo...

Executive Summary MicroStrategy (MSTR) has fundamentally transitioned from a traditional enterprise software firm into an equity-based Bitcoin (BTC) holding vehicle and treasury operation. Evaluating MSTR using conventional corporate finance metrics (such as Price-to-Earnings or EBITDA multiples) fails to capture the core driver of its equity valuation: the dynamic Net Asset ...