Publications by R Views
August 2017 New Package Picks
August was a relatively slow month for new R packages; “only” 180 new packages stuck to CRAN. Here are my “Top 40” picks organized into seven categories: Data, Machine Learning, Miscellaneous, Science, Statistics, Utilities and Visualizations. Although they have been written for specialized audiences, I have included the three “Science�...
9272 sym 26 img
WordR – A New R Package for Rendering Documents in MS Word Format
Motivation One day earlier this year, I was faced with the challenge of creating a report for management. It had to be an MS Word document (corporate requirement, you know). It was supposed to be polished and use many of the standard MS Word features like headers, footers, table of contents, and styles. I am not a Word guy, and besides, I wanted ...
5710 sym R (675 sym/3 pcs) 6 img
Climate Change and Population Modeling in R
A recent paper in nature climate change: Less than 2°C warming by 2100 unlikely (Raftery et al. 2017), concludes that the goal of the Paris Agreement is unlikely to be met. Although the conclusion is disheartening, the paper advances the science of climate modeling by developing a joint Bayesian hierarchical model for Gross Domestic Product per ...
2891 sym R (667 sym/1 pcs) 2 img
Introduction to Portfolio Returns
Today, we go back a bit to where we probably should have started in the first place, but it wouldn’t have been as much fun. In our previous work on volatility, we zipped through the steps of data import, tidy and transformation. Let’s correct that oversight and do some spade work on transforming daily asset prices to monthly portfolio log ret...
7602 sym R (4859 sym/17 pcs)
Database Queries With R
There are many ways to query data with R. This post shows you three of the most common ways: Using DBI Using dplyr syntax Using R Notebooks Background Several recent package improvements make it easier for you to use databases with R. The query examples below demonstrate some of the capabilities of these R packages. DBI. The DBI specification ...
5031 sym R (1121 sym/6 pcs) 2 img 1 tbl
The SeaClass R Package
The SeaClass R Package The Operations Technology and Advanced Analytics Group (OTAAG) at Seagate Technology has decided to share an internal project that helps accelerate development of classification models. The interactive SeaClass tool is contained in an R-based package built using shiny and other CRAN packages commonly used for binary classif...
4887 sym R (1779 sym/4 pcs) 2 img
September 2017 New Package Picks
There were so many interesting ideas among the 222 new packages that made it to CRAN in September that I found it exceptionally difficult to decide on the “Top 40” packages. In the end, I only managed to limit my selection to 40 by avoiding all packages that I would normally classify under “Data”: packages that are primarily intended to p...
10372 sym 24 img
Recent R Data Packages
It has never been easier to access data from R. Not only does there seem to be a constant stream of new packages that access the APIs of data providers, but it is also becoming popular for package authors to wrap up fairly large datasets into R packages. Below are 44 R packages concerned with data in one way or another that have made it to CRAN o...
7070 sym 8 img
Automating Summary of Surveys with RMarkdown
This guide shows how to automate the summary of surveys with R and R Markdown using RStudio. This is great for portions of the document that don’t change (e.g., “the survey shows substantial partisan polarization”). The motivation is really twofold: efficiency (maximize the reusabililty of code, minimize copying and pasting errors) and repr...
10375 sym R (7445 sym/13 pcs) 10 img 2 tbl
Introduction to Visualizing Asset Returns
In a previous post, we reviewed how to import daily prices, build a portfolio, and calculate portfolio returns. Today, we will visualize the returns of our individual assets that ultimately get mashed into a portfolio. The motivation here is to make sure we have scrutinized our assets before they get into our portfolio, because once the portfolio...
5259 sym R (3601 sym/10 pcs) 10 img