One thing that is sure to get lost in my long note on macros in R is just how concise and powerful macros are. The problem is macros are concise, but they do a lot for you. So you get bogged down when you explain the joke. Let’s try to […]
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Introduction This note shares an experiment comparing the performance of a number of data processing systems available in R. Our notional or example problem is finding the top ranking item per group (group defined by three string columns, and order defined by a single numeric column). This is a common […]
Estimated reading time: 11 minutes
Not a full R article, but a quick note demonstrating by example the advantage of being able to collect many expressions and pack them into a single extend_se() node.
Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
Introduction In this note we will show how to speed up work in R by partitioning data and process-level parallelization. We will show the technique with three different R packages: rqdatatable, data.table, and dplyr. The methods shown will also work with base-R and other packages. For each of the above […]
Estimated reading time: 16 minutes
We are pleased to announce that seplyr version 0.5.8 is now available on CRAN. seplyr is an R package that provides a thin wrapper around elements of the dplyr package and (now with version 0.5.8) the tidyr package. The intent is to give the part time R user the ability […]
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
R tip: first organize your tasks in terms of data, values, and desired transformation of values, not initially in terms of concrete functions or code. I know I write a lot about coding in R. But it is in the service of supporting statistics, analysis, predictive analytics, and data science. […]
Estimated reading time: 11 minutes
There are a number of easy ways to avoid illegible code nesting problems in R. In this R tip we will expand upon the above statement with a simple example.
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
I think this is the R Tip that is going to be the most controversial yet. Its potential pitfalls include: it is a style prescription (which makes it different than and less immediately useful than something of the nature of R Tip: Force Named Arguments), and it is heterodox (this […]
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes