2022 Government & Public Sector R Conference
I’m excited to be speaking & hosting a workshop (November 30) at this year’s R Gov Conference (@rstatsai) along with many others on December 1-2! Join us in-person or virtually...continue reading.
Author: William Doane
Spreadsheets are OK for Data, Bad for Data Analyses
There are plentiful examples of spreadsheet applications leading analysts astray. Believe all the scary stories. Spreadsheets can silently damage your data, converting numbers to dates or dropping leading zeros from...continue reading.
Compact Guide to Classical Inference by Daniel Kaplan (or: How to Teach Stats)
“Both students and instructors perceive standard-error statistics as a confusing collection of specialized tools. To improve student learning, instructors long for a reduction in the number of topics needed to...continue reading.
The Language of Programming by Anjana Vakil
I like this recent GOTO conference talk about the role of linguistics in understanding the language of coding. It touches upon many issues I’ve noted over the years as well...continue reading.
Common statistical tests are linear models (or: how to teach stats)
This post by Jonas Kristoffer Lindeløv presents a parsimonious view of common statistical tests which are, on their own, confusingly and inconsistently named and, taken together, a mess. Jonas argues...continue reading.
issuer: Local issue tracking, no net required
The goal of issuer is to provide a simple issue tracker, hosted on your local file system, for those users who don’t want to or are disallowed from using cloud-based...continue reading.
Clean, Consistent Column Names
I like to standardize the column names of data I’m reading into R so that I don’t have to match column names from one dataset that has an i.d. column...continue reading.
Here is Your Data
It’s a common situation: you want to code and debug in R *and* leverage RMarkdown for a presentation or document. The challenge: file paths. Executing code in the console and from within...continue reading.
My RStudio Configuration
I help a few of dozen users install RStudio and learn R regularly. Whenever I need to install RStudio on a new machine, I have to think a bit about...continue reading.
Converting Individual Binary Vectors to a Value Based on Column Names
When processing data downloaded from popular survey engines, it’s not uncommon for multiple choice questions to be represented as one column per possible response coded as 0/1. So, a question...continue reading.
Common Uncommon Notations that Confuse New R Coders
Here are a few of the more commonly used notations found in R code and documentation that confuse coders of any skill level who are new to R. Be aware...continue reading.
The Shiny Module Design Pattern
Foremost in your mind should be the quintessential reality of R: Everything that happens in R is the result of a function call. Shiny is no exception. To write a...continue reading.
Writing Pipe-friendly Functions
Pipes have been a fundamental aspect of computer programming for many decades. In short, the semantics of pipes can be thought of as taking the output from the left-hand side...continue reading.
Three Deep Truths About R
Everything that exists in R is an object ~ John M. Chambers Everything that happens in R is the result of a function call ~ John M. Chambers Names have...continue reading.
step 0: assume a malicious universe
Here’s a thought puzzle for you… given the following line of computer code, “what could go wrong?” That is, what kinds of issues could arise from submitting that code to...continue reading.
I’m ‘not in’ right now…
Checking whether an item is in a vector or not in a vector is a common task. The notation in R is a little inelegant when expressing the “not in”...continue reading.
Defensively install packages in R
Often, your R code will rely on having one or more R packages available. A little defensive coding will save users of your code—including future-you—from having to figure out which packages...continue reading.
