Publications by R Views
Sept 2020: “Top 40” New CRAN Packages
Two hundred thirty-six new packages made it to CRAN in September. Here are my “Top 40” picks in eleven categories: Computational Methods, Data, Finance, Genomics, Machine Learning, Mathematics, Medicine, Statistics, Time Series, Utilities and Visualization. The large number of packages and, in my opinion, the high percentage of high quality w...
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Biologically Plausible Fake Survival Data
In two recent posts, one on the Disease Progression Model and the other on Fake Data, I highlighted some of R's tools for simulating data that exhibit desired correlations and other statistical properties. In this post, I’ll focus on a small cluster of R packages that support generating biologically plausible survival data. Background In an im...
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ROC Day at BARUG
This week, the Bay Area useR Group (BARUG) held a mini-conference focused on ROC Curves. Talks discussed the history of the ROC, extending ROC analysis to multiclass problems, various ways to think about and interpret ROC curves, and how to translate concrete business goals into the ROC framework, and pick the optimal threshold for a given proble...
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October 2020: “Top 40” New CRAN Packages
One hundred fifty-six new packages made it to CRAN in October. Here are my “Top 40” selections in eight categories: Computational Methods, Data, Epidemiology, Mathematics, Machine Learning, Statistics, Utilities, and Visualization. Computational Methods mcmcensemble v 2.0: Provides ensemble samplers for affine-invariant Monte Carlo Markov Cha...
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COVID-19 Mobility Data
We are in the middle of a mind-boggling natural experiment here in the United States. In spite of the advice from the CDC and dire warnings from our nation’s health care experts, millions of Americans will travel over the long holiday weekend. Although the number of people flying is significantly down from last year, there are still large numbe...
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Learn and Teach R
If you haven’t explored the RStudio website in a while, your next visit may include a pleasant surprise. I recently went to the Tidymodels page, just to see what was new and was immediately drawn into the new landscape imagined by the RStudio education team. Clicking on Get Started I came to a fork and a choice of going farther with Tidymodels ...
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Plotting Surfaces with R
In this post, I’d like to review some basic options for plotting three dimensional surfaces in R. In addition to producing some eye catching visualizations, plotting surfaces can also help develop one’s geometric intuition for the mathematics describing the surfaces. The first plot below shows a Helicoid surface which is the path a propeller ...
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November: “Top 40” New CRAN Packages
Two hundred ninety-two new packages made it to CRAN in November. Picking forty was unusually difficult. Nevertheless, here are my “Top 40” selections in twelve categories: Archaeology, Computational Methods, Data, Epidemiology, Games, Machine Learning, Mathematics, Medicine, Statistics, Time Series, Utilities, and Visualization. R developers ...
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COVID-19 Data: The Long Run
The world seems to have moved to a new phase of paying attention to COVID-19. We have gone from pondering daily plots of case counts, to puzzling through models and forecasts, and are now moving on to the vaccines and the science behind them. For data scientists, however, the focus needs to remain on the data and the myriad issues and challenges ...
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Wonderful Wednesdays
For almost a year now, the PSI Visualization Special Interest Group (VIS SIG) has been conducting a monthly graduate-level seminar on creating effective statistical visualizations that is open to everyone. Wonderful Wednesdays is a unique collegial event. Every month the SIG publishes a link to a new data set and issues a challenge to produce vis...
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