Quantcast
Channel: r software hub
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 1015

Our R package roundup

$
0
0

By Christoph Safferling

gif

It’s the time of the year again where one eats too much, and gets in a reflective mood! 2015 is nearly over, and us bloggers here at opiateforthemass.es thought it would be nice to argue endlessly which R package was the best/neatest/most fun/most useful/most whatever in this year!

Since we are in a festive mood, we decided we would not fight it out but rather present our top five of new R packages, a purely subjective list of packages we (and Chuck Norris) approves of.

But do not despair, dear reader! We have also pulled hard data on R package popularity from CRAN, and will present this first.

Let’s start with some factual data before we go into our personal favourites of 2015. We’ll pull the titles of the new 2015 R packages from cranberries, and parse the CRAN downloads per day using cranlogs package.

Using downloads per day as a ranking metric could have the problem that earlier package releases have had more time to create a buzz and shift up the average downloads per day, skewing the data in favour of older releases. Or, it could have the complication that younger package releases are still on the early “hump” part of the downloads (let’s assume they’ll follow a log-normal (exponential decay) distribution, which most of these things do), thus skewing the data in favour of younger releases. I don’t know, and this is an interesting question I think we’ll tackle in a later blog post…

For now, let’s just assume that average downloads per day is a relatively stable metric to gauge package success with. We’ll grab the packages released using rvest:

berries  read_html("http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/cranberries/2015/")
titles  berries %>% html_nodes("b") %>% html_text
new  titles[grepl("^New package", titles)] %>% 
  gsub("^New package (.*) with initial .*", "1", .) %>% unique

and then lapply() these titles …read more

Source:: r-bloggers.com


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 1015

Trending Articles