Publications by Noam Ross

Don’t R alone! A guide to tools for collaboration with R

07.01.2013

This a brief guide to using R in collaborative, social ways. R is a powerful open-source programming language for data analysis, statistics, and visualization, but much of its power derives from a large, engaged community of users. This is an introduction to tools for engaging the community to improve your R code and collaborate with others. (Am ...

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Steve Culman on the `plyr` Package

17.01.2013

At Davis R Users’ Group yesteray, Steve Culman gave us an introduction to the plyr package and how to use it to manipulate data. Here’s his presentation, and the accompanying demonstration script: Steve’s talk is based on this paper by Hadley Wickham in the Journal of Statistical Software. A lot of useful related resources are at Hadley Wi...

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Ryan Peek on using xts and ggplot for time-series data

06.02.2013

At Davis R Users’ Group today, Ryan Peek gave a presentation on how he takes data from his field instruments and visualizes it in R. Here are his notes. The original *.Rmd file and data can be found here SHORT HOW-TO ON USING XTS AND GGPLOT FOR TIME SERIES DATA XTS is a very helpful package when working with time series data. I work with temper...

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Mason Earles on interfacing R with the Forest Vegetation Simulator

13.02.2013

Mason Earles gave a great presentation this week at Davis R Users’ Group about linking R with the Forest Vegetation Simulator (FVS). FVS is a model developed by the US Forest Service to simulate forest growth over time. It’s written in FORTRAN and has been around since the 1970s. FVS has recently gone open-source (its repository is on google ...

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Model Selection and Multi-Model Inference

20.02.2013

At D-RUG this week Rosemary Hartman presented a really useful case study in model selection, based on her work on frog habitat. Here is her code run through ‘knitr’. Original code and data are posted here. (yes, I am just doing this for the flying monkey) Editor’s note: we’re giving away flying monkey dolls from our sponsor, Revolution An...

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Demographic analysis using the `popbio` library and some other fun stuff

04.04.2013

This week at the Davis R Users’ Group we had a great presentation by Kara Moore O’Leary on using the popbio package to examine rare plant demographics. The following is her script run through knitr. You can download the original script and associated data here. Find out more about Kara and her work at her website here Demographic analysis usi...

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Debugging Tools in R with Michael Hannon

18.04.2013

Today at Davis R Users’ Group, Michael Hannon gave a great talk on how to use R’s native debugging functions. Here are his notes and code. Introduction This is a discussion of debugging techniques in R. It is based on a paper by Roger Peng, now at Johns Hopkins University (http://www.biostat.jhsph.edu/~rpeng/docs/R-debug-tools.pdf) Focus on f...

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FasteR! HigheR! StrongeR! – A Guide to Speeding Up R Code for Busy People

25.04.2013

This is an overview of tools for speeding up your R code that I wrote for the Davis R Users’ Group. First, Ask “Why?” It’s customary to quote Donald Knuth at this point, but instead I’ll quote my twitter buddy Ted Hart to illustrate a point: I’m just going to say it.I like for loops in #Rstats, makes my code readable.All you [a-z]*pl...

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Improved R Profiling Summaries

02.05.2013

In my last post I mentioned that I had improved on R’s summaryRprof() function with a custom function called proftable(). I’ve updated proftable() to take advantage of R 3.0.0’s ability to record line numbers while profiling. I’ve put it on github – you can get it there or below. proftable reads in a file generated by Rprof() and create...

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Robert Hijmans on Spatial Data Analysis

23.05.2013

Last week at the Davis R Users’ Group Robert Hijmans gave a talk about spatial data analysis in R. Robert is a professor of biogeography at UC Davis and the author of the raster (analysis of gridded data), dismo (species distribution modeling), and geosphere (spherical trigonometry), packages. Robert’s presentation spanned topics including ba...

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