R Works

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.

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.

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

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?

Vidisha Vachharajani

Digital Difficulties

Puzzle Corner

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

December 2024 Top 40 New CRAN Packages

Top 40

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.’

November 2024 Top 40 New CRAN Packages

Top 40

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

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

Puzzle Corner

Let’s run some modular arithmetic using R.

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.

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.

John Mount, Joseph Rickert

October 2024: Top 40 New CRAN Packages

Top 40

One hundred eighty-one new packages made CRAN’s final cut in October.

100 Bushels of Corn, Revisited

Puzzle Corner

We find more solutions to the 100 Bushels of Corn puzzle using the numbers R package.

John Mount, Nina Zumel

100 Bushels of Corn

Puzzle Corner

100 bushes of corn are distributed to 100 people such that every man receives 3 bushels, every woman 2 bushels, and every child 1/2 a bushel. How many men, women, and children are there? (Solved with R).

Manifold Learning

Manifold Learning reduces data dimensions to discover patterns for analysis and visualization. This post provides an overview of Manifold Learning and its algorithms, the tsne package, and other R tools and resources.

R Work Opportunities

R Community

Explore new job opportunities that highlight R skills.

Isabella Velásquez

September 2024: Top 40 New CRAN Packages

Top 40

Two hundred thirty new packages made it to CRAN in September. Here are my “Top 40” selections in 17 categories.

August 2024: Top 40 New CRAN Packages

Top 40

“Top 40” is back, broadcasting on the new R Works blog.

Welcome to R Works!

R Community

We hope that the R Works blog informs and inspires R users everywhere.