R Weekly 2023-W13 Base R, ChatGPT, Alt-Text (2024)

27 Mar 2023

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This week’s release was curated by Ryo Nakagawara, with help from the R Weekly team members and contributors.

Highlight

• Some love for Base R. Part 1

• Teaching ChatGPT What It Doesn’t Know

• Alt Text in R: Plots, Reports, and Shiny

Insights

• Some love for Base R. Part 1

• Some love for Base R. Part 2

• Why should I use R: The Excel R Data Wrangling comparison: Part 1

R in the Real World

• Teaching ChatGPT What It Doesn’t Know

• How old was Aragorn in regular human years?

R in Organizations

• Shiny Use Cases within Pharma

New Packages

📦 Go Live for More New Pkgs 📦

CRAN

• {octopus} 0.1.2: R package for database management. Upload files, view tables and schemas, send queries, and more.

• {distillML} 0.1.0.13: Model Distillation and Interpretability Methods for MachineLearning Models - diffify

• {Rforestry} 0.10.0: Random Forests, Linear Trees, and Gradient Boosting forInference and Interpretability - diffify

• {usedthese} 0.3.2: Summarises Package & Function Usage - diffify

• {dtrackr} 0.4.0: Track your Data Pipelines - diffify

• {simplermarkdown} 0.0.6: Simple Engine for Generating Reports using R - diffify

• {metR} 0.14.0: Tools for Easier Analysis of Meteorological Fields - diffify

• {crew} 0.0.5: A Distributed Worker Launcher - diffify

• {finnts} 0.2.3: Microsoft Finance Time Series Forecasting Framework - diffify

• {GIGrvg} 0.8: Random Variate Generator for the GIG Distribution - diffify

GitHub or Bitbucket

• {macrtools} 0.0.0.9000: R package that downloads and setups a compiled code environment for macOS.

• {quartificate} 0.0.0.9000: Transform Google Docs into Quarto Books.

Updated Packages

🔍 Search on R-universe 🔍

• {parallelly} 1.35.0 - Enhancing the ‘parallel’ Package - diffify

• {doFuture} 1.0.0 - Use Foreach to Parallelize via the Future Framework - diffify

• {port4me} 0.5.1 - Get the Same, Personal, Free TCP Port over and over. - diffify

• {shinytest} 1.5.3: Test Shiny Apps - diffify

• {see} 0.7.5.1: Visualisation toolbox for beautiful and publication-ready figures. - diffify

• {peacesciencer} 1.1.0: Tools and Data for Quantitative Peace Science Research - diffify

• {googlesheets4} 1.1.0 - diffify

• {drake} 7.13.5: A Pipeline Toolkit for Reproducible Computation at Scale - diffify

• {dtplyr} 1.3.1: Data Table Back-End for ‘dplyr’ - diffify

• {dplyr} 1.1.1: A Grammar of Data Manipulation - diffify

• {RcppSMC} 0.2.7: Rcpp Bindings for Sequential Monte Carlo - diffify

• {modelr} 0.1.11: Modelling Functions that Work with the Pipe - diffify

• {lessR} 4.2.8: Less Code, More Results - diffify

• {chatgpt} 0.2.2: Interface to ‘ChatGPT’ from R - diffify

• {pillar} 1.9.0: Coloured Formatting for Columns - diffify

• {Tinflex} 2.4: A Universal Non-Uniform Random Number Generator - diffify

• {dbplyr} 2.3.2: A ‘dplyr’ Back End for Databases - diffify

• {funneljoin} 0.2.0: Time-Based Joins to Analyze Sequences of Events - diffify

• {caret} 6.0-94: Classification and Regression Training - diffify

• {gglm} 1.0.2: Grammar of Graphics for Linear Model Diagnostic Plots - diffify

• {ggbrain} 0.8.1: Create Images of Volumetric Brain Data in NIfTI Format Using ‘ggplot2’ Syntax - diffify

• {edibble} 0.1.3: Designing Comparative Experiments - diffify

• {feasts} 0.3.1: Feature Extraction and Statistics for Time Series - diffify

• {googledrive} 2.1.0: An Interface to Google Drive - diffify

• {glmnet} 4.1-7: Lasso and Elastic-Net Regularized Generalized Linear Models - diffify

Videos and Podcasts

• Listen to the R-Weekly Highlights Podcast

• Shiny modules in 100 seconds

• Descriptive statistics with R

• pmax & pmin Functions in R (3 Examples), How to Handle Warnings & NA, Two Different Length Vectors

• Demystifying . . . (dots): R package dev fundamentals

Gist & Cookbook

• purrr::map() is a superpower when I need to produce consistent maps in bulk for a report or presentation. I made 51 maps in 51 seconds, each with an appropriate title

Tutorials

• WebR Filesystem Machinations & ReefR

• You’re One JavaScript Function Call Away From Using (Most) WebR R Functions In Your WebR-Powered Apps/Sites

• Replicated an E-Commerce Store Using My Custom Package, starBliss

• Unlocking the Power of purrr: How to Create Multiple Lags Like a Pro in R

• Alt Text in R: Plots, Reports, and Shiny

• The tidymodels is getting a whole lot faster

• R renv: How to Manage Dependencies in R Projects Easily

• Dumbbell Chart with a Gap Column Tutorial

• Recreating images on single line spirals

R Project Updates

Updates from R Core:

Call for Participation

• Take the State of Shiny 2023 survey!

• posit::conf() deadlines extended!

• Seeking community endorsem*nt for an upgrade to ‘Big Book of R’

Upcoming Events in 3 Months

Events in 3 Months:

• A list of R conferences and meetings

• This week’s local R-User and applied stats events

+Weekly R Workshops for Ukraine

• Announcing R/Medicine 2023!

• April 13: Generalized Additive Models in R Workshop

• April 20: Dataviz with R and ggplot: Using colour and annotations for effective story telling workshop

• April 22: SatRdays London 2023

• June 21-23: Rencontres R Avignon, France @rencontres_R

Grants & Funding

• R Consortium ISC Call for Proposals - Infrastructure Steering Committee (ISC) grants for low-to-medium risk projects with a focused scope and likely to have a broad impact on the R Community. Deadline 2023-04-01.

Jobs

💼 Explore Jobs & Gigs Board on RStudio Community 💼

rtistry

Today was hard..... but I got writing and package dev done though. Today was all about squares. Added a square packing fx to the art package and one that generates the data for a square. It's coming along. #rtistry in #rstats pic.twitter.com/yPnqtoCW2a

— Meghan Harris (@meghansharris) March 25, 2023

Couldn't resist logging on for 5 minutes to give this script another whirl. Honestly. #Partygate.

All done in #rstats. Shapes and colours determined by the text in the current @guardian headline and the body of the article.

#rtistry #GenArt #CreativeCoding pic.twitter.com/jkN4HzWdSW

— Cara Thompson | @[emailprotected] (@cararthompson) March 21, 2023

Quotes of the Week

"Base #RStats has many lesser-known helper functions like `reformulate()` and `toString()`.

It’s quite surprising that even high-rated questions on SO don't contain a single answer mentioning the former 😱⁰⁰At the same time, I regularly keep forgetting the latter myself 😅 pic.twitter.com/W6IL9xR6GL

— Tim Tiefenbach (@TimTeaFan) March 17, 2023

People who don't cite R packages, why?

— Dr. Andrew Barnas (@AndrewBarnas) March 21, 2023

purrr::map() is a superpower when I need to produce consistent maps in bulk for a report or presentation

In the linked example (with shapefiles previously cached), I made 51 maps in 51 seconds, each with an appropriate title#rstats https://t.co/S2VuFiLPib pic.twitter.com/5RQClOkB0t

— Kyle Walker (@kyle_e_walker) March 23, 2023