Heavy R programming – Heavy News

News and information about the R programming language

PCA in R: Principal Component Analysis Step-by-Step (prcomp + ggplot2)
How to Perform PCA in R: A Step-by-Step Tutorial Using prcomp() To perform PCA in R, use the built-in prcomp() function: pca 1), or a cumulative variance threshold — this tutorial shows all three and where they disagree. PCA is not the same as Factor Analysis. The comparison table below explains exactly … Continue reading: […]
EuroBioC2026 conference recap
The European Bioconductor Conference 2026 (EuroBioC2026) took place from June 3-5, 2026, in Turku, Finland. Hosted by the University of Turku and the Finnish Society for Bioinformatics at BioCity, the conference brought together the Bioconducto… Continue reading: EuroBioC2026 conference recap
Celebrating Our Maintainers during Maintainers Month
May was Open Source Software Maintainer Month. Behind every R package there is at least one person who responds to issues, reviews pull requests, keeps up with dependency changes, and makes sure everything still works. During Maintainer Month we wante… Continue reading: Celebrating Our Maintainers during Maintainers Month
Likert Scale Questions: Your In-Depth Guide
A Likert scale (pronounced LICK-ert, not "LIKE-ert") is a psychometric rating scale used in surveys and questionnaires to measure attitudes, opinions, and perceptions. Named after American social psychologist Rensis Likert, who developed it in 1932, it remains the most widely used approach to scaling responses in survey research today. Key Takeaways … Continue reading: Likert […]
2026 Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics Awarded to R Core Team for Transforming Statistics Computing Worldwide
The Rousseeuw Prize honors five pioneering developers for nearly three decades of unpaid work building R, the foundational open-source computing language behind artificial intelligence, healthcare, and economic decision-making. The $1 million Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics recognizes three decades of foundational work that transformed how statistical methods are developed, validated, and shared … Continue reading: 2026 […]
{talib}: Interactive financial charts
{talib} is a new R package built on TA-Lib, which is now available on CRAN. The R-package is targeted at individuals and, perhaps, institutions who, in some form or the other, interacts with the financial markets using technical analysis. The library is built with minimal dependencies for long-term stability and … Continue reading: {talib}: Interactive […]
Announcing shiny.webawesome: a web UI package for R/Shiny
shiny.webawesome brings Web Awesome to R Shiny through generated wrappers, reactive bindings, and a bundled runtime. It aims for complete component support while staying close enough to upstream that the Web Awesome docs and examples are directly useful in everyday package use. CRAN | R-universe | Package website | Source repository Background … Continue reading: […]
RStudio AI That Doesn’t Cost a Penny: llmcoder vs. Posit AI Assistant
Introduction If you’re an R user, you’ve probably experienced these moments: You’re writing code and forgot the exact syntax for a function Your code throws an error and you’re staring at a confusing error message You have a block of code but want to understand what … Continue reading: RStudio AI That Doesn’t Cost a […]
New CRAN Package for sparse PCA – msPCA
The package msPCA is now available on CRAN! It implements a new method for computing multiple sparse principal components of a dataset. Unlike other available packages, it generates PCs that are sparse and orthogonal, leading to a generally higher fra… Continue reading: New CRAN Package for sparse PCA – msPCA
DIVINE: a new R package for working with a real-world COVID-19 clinical cohort
Clinical data are rarely as clean, compact or convenient as the examples we often use when teaching statistics or R. Real hospital datasets are usually distributed across several tables, include missing values, contain repeated structures, and require careful documentation before they can be reused. The new R package DIVINE is … Continue reading: DIVINE: a […]

The 8 Best R Programming Books in 2022

New course aims to train next generation of data scientists

“Ogihara and Bonnell chose to use R because it is attuned to statistical analysis and, by incorporating an increasingly popular collection of tools in R called tidyverse, students can easily learn how to process, wrangle, transform, and model data on their own, too.”