Nick Tierney's (mostly) rstats blog
Credibly Curious Nick Tierney's (mostly) rstats blog I recently gave a talk, The value in teaching is not the content it’s the teacher My main point in this is: Your course materials should be out there in public for free online. To help support this, this blog post goes through the technical details I note in one of my slides: How to Put your Course Book Online. Summary Make a quarto book Add an…
Credibly Curious Nick Tierney's (mostly) rstats blog Some windows. Olympus XA, Portra 800. Photo by Nicholas Tierney The new R version 4.5.0 is out, and you should get it! I’ve read through the NEWS file , which details every change - there are many! I would recommend having a skim. If you’d like to have a skim of the news file, you even use the news() R function, which will open the NEWS file to…
Credibly Curious Nick Tierney's (mostly) rstats blog I’m super stoked to announce {geotargets} version 0.2.0! The {geotargets} package extends {targets} to work with geospatial data formats. I’d like to firstly acknowledge the strong work by Eric Scott on getting this release ready. I do want to emphasise that while post is on my website, this project is very much a team effort. You can download…
Credibly Curious Nick Tierney's (mostly) rstats blog I’m very happy to announce {geotargets} version 0.1.0! The {geotargets} package extends {targets} to work with geospatial data formats. Version 0.1.0 supports terra::vect() , terra::rast() and terra::sprc() formats. This R package is only possible due to the great work by Eric Scott and Andrew Brown . While this blog post is on my website, I…
Credibly Curious Nick Tierney's (mostly) rstats blog My venetian blinds, in black and white I recently watched Josiah Parry’s wonderful video, “Making R 300x times faster!” It’s a great demonstration of how to rewrite code to be faster, and it’s worth your time. He rewrites some R code to be faster, then improves the speed again by writing some Rust code, which is called from R. He gets a 300…
Credibly Curious Nick Tierney's (mostly) rstats blog I’m happy to announce that naniar version 1.1.0 “Prince Caspian” is released. It’s been about a year since the last releaase, so I’m happy to include some new features. Let’s explore some of the new changes in this release options ( tidyverse.quiet = TRUE ) library ( tidyverse ) library ( naniar ) Imputation functions I’ve always been a hesitant…
Credibly Curious Nick Tierney's (mostly) rstats blog To help me be more accountable, and also work out how to plan my year and work out what’s important to me, I thought I’d share some of my goals for 2024. Writing it all down is a bit scary, and it makes me think that maybe I might be a bit ambitious here. But I think it’s OK to be ambitious. Learn JS and Rust I’d like to try and pick up another…
Credibly Curious Nick Tierney's (mostly) rstats blog I’ve been trying to read a bit more widely about R programming and other features of programming lately. I’ve seen some great newsletters from people like Bob Rudis in his “Daily Drop” series , and I think that has inspired me to collect my monthly reading notes into a blog post / digest / newsletter type thing. I guess to articulate more…
Credibly Curious Nick Tierney's (mostly) rstats blog Error messages are really important, and really hard to write well. When software authors take the time to check your inputs, and share reasons why it fails, they are doing you a favour. So, writing error messages is good. However, this error checking code can sometimes totally eclipse the intent of the code. We can describe these kinds of…
Credibly Curious Nick Tierney's (mostly) rstats blog Previously, I wrote a blog post, “How to get good with R” , where I touched on a bunch of ideas on how to improve your R skills, focussing on the coding aspect. It is by no means definitive, and I kind of wish I had named it “How to improve your R skills” or something less grandiose. But it was a catchy title. Anyway, I digress. I said I would…
Credibly Curious Nick Tierney's (mostly) rstats blog A Stop Sign in Melbourne, Film, Pentax K1000, Nick Tierney Someone recently asked me, “How do you get good with R?”. It’s a good question. I’m not sure I have a good answer. But I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve got some ideas. Hopefully they are helpful for people, or can promote discussion on making better ideas. I think you can view…
Credibly Curious Nick Tierney's (mostly) rstats blog I am very pleased to say that I have received funding from the R consortium for improving R’s capacity to explore and handle missing values! More accurately, this funding was initially awarded in 2022, but this has been bubbling along now and is now picking up steam, so I wanted to give an update. In this blog post I will discuss the first…
Credibly Curious Nick Tierney's (mostly) rstats blog naniar 1.0.0 I’m very pleased to announce that naniar version 1.0.0 is now on CRAN! Version 1.0.0 of naniar is to signify that this release is associated with the publication of the associated JSS paper doi:10.18637/jss.v105.i07 (!!!). This paper has been the labour of a lot of effort between myself and Di Cook , and I am very excited to be able…
Credibly Curious Nick Tierney's (mostly) rstats blog I’m please to say that visdat version 0.6.0 (codename: “Superman, Lazlo Bane”) is now on CRAN. This is the first release in nearly 3 years, there are a couple of new functions for visualising numeric and binary data, as well as some maintenance and bug fixes. Let’s walk through some of the new features, bug fixes, and other misc changes. New…
Credibly Curious Nick Tierney's (mostly) rstats blog Two Abandoned Trolleys, Nick Tierney, Film, Olympus XA I recently had to make some pyramid plots in R. They are a useful way to compare age structures of populations. They look like this: Age population structure of Sydney vs Melbourne It’s been a while since I had to make them, and in the past I’ve cooked them up in a relatively bespoke way.…
Credibly Curious Nick Tierney's (mostly) rstats blog pigeons across the drain, Nick Tierney, film, olympus XA A colleague of mine the other day had a question along the lines of: How do I add multiple columns that give the ranks of values in corresponding columns And I ended up cooking up a really fun example of using across from dplyr . I thought it would be fun to share! Let’s give a little more…
Credibly Curious Nick Tierney's (mostly) rstats blog I’ve recently started transitioning my online book, rmarkdown for scientists from rmarkdown / bookdown to the new quarto . This will be a new book, called (perhaps not the most original name), “quarto for scientists” . Alison Hill recently wrote a great post, “We don’t talk about quarto” that led me to see the benefits, and also that this will…
Credibly Curious Nick Tierney's (mostly) rstats blog Photo By Nick Tierney Last week I needed to understand how to calculate how much two spatial areas overlapped. I found a nice thread on GIS stack exchange that explained an answer (from user Sandy AB ). This pretty much gave me what I was looking for - but I was after something with more pictures, so here’s an example of that. The Data I started…
Credibly Curious Nick Tierney's (mostly) rstats blog The other day a colleague of mine ran into an issue where NA values were appearing in their dataset that weren’t there before - it was strange stuff! A close look revealed some interesting things, that I thought might be worthwhile briefly going into. It is to do with the use of [] when subsetting, and how this is different to base::subset and…
Credibly Curious Nick Tierney's (mostly) rstats blog The COVID19 vaccines (plural!) are rolling out around the world, and about 4 weeks ago in late Feb, Australians got their first vaccine jab . It’s a pretty massive relief that these vaccines (plural!!!) are rolling out so soon. The ABC helps answer, “When will you get the COVID-19 vaccine?” , which is super cool! The Australian government…