December 2011 issue of the R Journal: An overview

The December 2011 issue of the R Journal is now available for download. Three times a year, the open-access journal of the R project publishes peer-reviewed articles on research and applications of R and R packages. As of the latest issue, all articles are published under a Creative Commons license, making them accessible for translation, academic and commercial uses with attribution.

As always, this latest issue includes several interesting and useful articles about R, including:

• How to add classification and regression tree functionality to Microsoft Excel, making use of R’s rpart function and the RExcel add-in for Excel.
• An overview of the glm2 package, an alternative to the standard glm function for problems with tricky convergence properties.
• Using R to spellcheck natural language documents (useful as a preprocessing step in text analysis).
• Using the GoogleVis package to create interactive motion charts, time series charts, tree maps and geographic maps from R data. (This is the package used by Lloyd’s of London for the Statistics Related to Lloyd’s on-line application.)
• GrapheR, a GUI for drawing customizable and high-quality statistical charts (without needing to program in R).
• The R package “rainbow” for visualizing functional data (where every “data point” is a continuous curve), like the “functional bagplot” shown below.
• Writing portable C++ code for R packages to run on multiple platforms.
• And articles on Sweave and DOCSTRIP, optimal k-means clustering, and nonparametric goodness-of-fit tests.

“Functional Bagplot” generated by the rainbow package

This issue also includes news from the BioConductor project, a report on R’s participation in the Google Summer of Code, a review of the useR! 2011 user conference and a preview of useR! 2012. 

More Read

Zombie Spreadsheets

New Data Analytics Breakthroughs Give eCommerce Startups a Fighting Chance

The New Mainstream Appeal of Apache Spark

How to Boost Data Analytics Adoption by Improving the User Experience

Decision Tree Bagging

Many thanks to Heather Turner, who served as Editor in Chief of the R Journal in 2011 and oversaw its transition from R-news. Martyn Plummer takes the one-year term for 2012. Thanks also to Peter Dalgaard who has served on the editorial board for four years; his seat will now be held by Deepayan Sarkar.

The R Journal: Volume 3/2, December 2011