Publications by bryan
Helper Function Contest
Just in time for the holidays, ProgrammingR is giving you the opportunity to win a gift for yourself or someone who loves R. And in the spirit of the holidays, you’ll also be giving back to the R community. In the last article I presented two helper functions I use often. I also teased an upcoming, related event. This is that event. The premis...
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R for Dummies – De Vries and Meys (2012)
The for Dummies series has been around since 1991. (A bit of trivia, DOS for Dummies was the first title.) I’ve owned a few books in the series and have been adequately impressed with most of them, but when I learned there was an R for Dummies I was immediately skeptical. Possibly I was skeptical because R has a steep learning curve and many id...
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SPARQL with R in less than 5 minutes
In this article we’ll get up and running on the Semantic Web in less than 5 minutes using SPARQL with R. We’ll begin with a brief introduction to the Semantic Web then cover some simple steps for downloading and analyzing government data via a SPARQL query with the SPARQL R package. What is the Semantic Web? To newcomers, the Semantic Web can...
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Global Indicator Analyses with R
I was recently asked by a client to create a large number of “proof of concept” visualizations that illustrated the power of R for compiling and analyzing disparate datasets. The client was specifically interested in automated analyses of global data. A little research led me to the WDI package. The WDI package is a tool to “search, extract...
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Creating your personal, portable R code library with GitHub
As I discussed in a previous post, I have a few helper functions I’ve created that I commonly use in my work. Until recently, I manually included these functions at the start of my R scripts by either the tried and true copy-and-paste method, or by extracting them from a local file with the source() function. The former approach has the benefit...
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Calling Python from R with rPython
Python has generated a good bit of buzz over the past year as an alternative to R. Personal biases aside, an expert makes the best use of the available tools, and sometimes Python is better suited to a task. As a case in point, I recently wanted to pull data via the Reddit API. There isn’t an R package that provides easy access to the Reddit AP...
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