R Works

Tidyverse with GitHub Copilot for Healthcare Analytics – Part 1

In this post, the first in a series of two focused on healthcare applications, I will introduce a complex healthcare data set and outline the problems I propose to solve using tidyverse and GitHub Copilot to facilitate nuanced argument tuning of tidyverse functions and accelerate the data analysis process.

2025-06-04

Vidisha Vachharajani

April 2025 Top 40 New CRAN Packages

Top 40

An attempt to capture the depth and breadth of what’s new on CRAN. Here are my Top 40 picks in twenty-two categories: Archaeology, Artificial Intelligence, Biology, Chemistry, Climate Science, Data, Ecology, Epidemiology, Genomics, Geoscience, Health Technology Assessment, Linguistics, Machine Learning,Mathematics, Medicine, Networks, Psychology, Statistics, Time Series, Utilities, and Visualization.

2025-05-28

Joseph Rickert

Book cover of Evidence Synthesis for Decision Making in Healthcare

Cost-Effectiveness Analysis

In a previous post, we presented an rjags version of a Bayesian model from the textbook: Evidence Synthesis for Decision Making in Healthcare by Welton et al. (2012). This post continues the work of porting key models from the text to JAGS.

2025-05-19

Robert Horton and Joseph Rickert

A Data Scientist’s View of Running R in Visual Studio Code

VS Code is Microsoft’s open-source software development environment that can be customized for any language. It is arguably the general purpose GUI programming tool of choice when working across multiple computer languages. As a data scientist, its R - Python integration deserves careful consideration.

2025-05-08

John Mark Agosta

Conditional distribution of age across groups

March 2025 Top 40 New CRAN Packages

Top 40

An attempt to capture the depth and breadth of what’s new on CRAN: here are my Top 40 picks in sixteen categories: Agriculture, Archaeology, Biology, Climate Modeling, Computational Methods, Data, Ecology, Epidemiology, Genomics, Machine Learning, Medicine, Risk Forecasting, Statistics, Time Series, Utilities, and Visualization.

2025-04-30

Joseph Rickert

Down a Rabbit Hole with ARIMA Models

This post describes a chance encounter with a time series data set for which the forecast and fable packages found different ARIMA models that don’t look much alike, but produce surprisingly close forecasts. It is a reminder of the inherent identifiability problem of ARIMA models and a record of a couple of afternoons spent down this rabbit hole.

2025-04-11

Joseph Rickert

February 2025 Top 40 New CRAN Packages

Top 40

An attempt to capture the depth and breadth of what’s new on CRAN: Here are my Top 40 picks in fifteen categories: Artificial Intelligence, Computational Methods, Ecology, Genomics, Health Sciences, Mathematics, Machine Learning, Medicine, Music, Pharma, Statistics, Time Series, Utilities, Visualization, and Weather.

2025-03-28

Joseph Rickert

$Four 2x2 grids with different colorings. The top left grid has four squares, all blue. The top right grid has four squares, the top two are yellow, and the bottom two are blue. The bottom left grid has four squares, with alternating colors going from left to right and top to bottom: red, blue, blue, red. The bottom right grid has alternating colors going from left to right and top to bottom: red, blue, yellow, green.$

How Many Ways to Color This Grid: Teaching Combinatorics Using R

Puzzle Corner

A simplified version of the four color theorem: suppose you have a 2x2 grid of squares, and you need to paint each square one of four colors: red, blue, green, or yellow. The restriction is that no two adjacent squares (sharing a side) can have the same color. How many valid ways can you color the grid?

2025-03-21

Vidisha Vachharajani

Original-Odhner-Arithmos-Typ-5 calculator, circa 1912-1928. Source: Wikipedia

Digital Difficulties

Puzzle Corner

Here’s another puzzle, from Henry Dudeney’s Perplexities column in Strand Magazine, January 1924.

2025-03-14

Nina Zumel

Evidence Synthesis for Decision Making in Healthcare

This post presents a JAGS version of a WinBUGS model presented in the classic textbook Evidence Synthesis for Decision Making in Healthcare by Nicky J. Welton, Alexander J. Sutton, Nicola J. Cooper, Keith R. Abrams, and A.E. Ades.

2025-03-12

Joseph Rickert and Robert Horton

January 2025 Top 40 New CRAN Packages

Top 40

An attempt to capture the depth and breadth of what’s new on CRAN.

2025-02-28

Joseph Rickert

A First Look at TimeGPT using nixtlar

TimeGPT is a pre-trained, multi-layer, encoder/decoder transformer model with self-attention mechanisms designed specifically for time series forecasting. This post, a revision of the of the post first published on 2025-02-12, corrects an error that deleteriously affected the ARIMA and exponential smoothing forecasts which are contrasted with the TimeGPT forecast.

2025-02-19

Joseph Rickert

Plot showing unbalanced treatment group sizes

Simpson’s Paradox in a Logistic Regression

In this post, I show an example of Simpson’s paradox in a logistic regression model of synthetic clinical trial data.

2025-02-07

Nina Zumel

December 2024 Top 40 New CRAN Packages

Top 40

An attempt to capture the depth and breadth of what’s new on CRAN.

2025-01-27

Joseph Rickert

Old-School Golden scale in balance with a hand putting a coin on it

Dyson’s Algorithm: The General Case

Puzzle Corner

In a previous post, I described The Twelve Coins Problem, a notoriously hard problem that comes in many flavors and was popular on both sides of the Atlantic during World War II. In this post, I show how to build on Freeman Dyson’s solution to solve a generalization of the problem.

2025-01-24

Nina Zumel

Some R Conferences for 2025

R Community

We share a list of upcoming conferences that either focus on the R programming language or showcase its use in the field.

2025-01-16

Isabella Velásquez

Bayesian Meta-Analysis with brms

In our previous post, Examining Meta Analysis, we contrasted a frequentist version of a meta analysis conducted with R’s meta package with a Bayesian meta analysis done mostly in stan using therstan package as a front end. In this post, we repeat the analysis using the brms package, which also depends on stan but allows the user to formulate complex Bayesian models without writing any stan code.

2025-01-13

Joseph Rickert, John Mount

Dyson’s Algorithm for the Twelve Coins Problem

Puzzle Corner

The Twelve Coins Problem, a notoriously hard problem that comes in many flavors, was popular on both sides of the Atlantic during World War II; it was even suggested that it should be dropped over Germany in an attempt to sabotage their war effort.

2025-01-10

Nina Zumel

The Perplexed Banker

Puzzle Corner

A man went into a bank with 1,000 silver dollars and 10 bags. He said, ‘Place this money, please, in the bags in such a way that if I call and ask for a certain number of dollars you can hand me over one or more bags, giving me the exact amount called for without opening any of the bags.’

2024-12-20

Nina Zumel

November 2024 Top 40 New CRAN Packages

Top 40

An attempt to capture the depth and breadth of what’s new on CRAN.

2024-12-18

Joseph Rickert

A balance scale and four weights. Source: Internet Archive

Writing Signed Trinary: or, Back To the Four Weights Problem

Puzzle Corner

Let’s run some modular arithmetic using R.

2024-12-13

Nina Zumel

Bachet’s Four Weights Problem

Puzzle Corner

Learn how to solve Bachet’s Four Weights Problem using R, with code and explanations to measure weights from 1 to 40 efficiently.

2024-12-06

Nina Zumel

Examining Meta-Analysis

In this post we would like to review the idea of meta-analysis and compare a traditional, frequentist style, random effects meta-analysis to Bayesian methods.

2024-11-26

John Mount, Joseph Rickert