Heavy R programming – Heavy News

News and information about the R programming language

The rule of law and economic growth: what three decades of data show
Weighted by population, the rule of law has slipped globally since 1996. India and the United States contributed a large part to this decline, while China's net impact was negligible thanks to a recovery from the mid 00's. Countries with a stronger rule of law tend to be wealthier, and those … Continue reading: The […]
Agents in Production: Build an AI Chat App with Shiny and {shinychat}
The agent we built in part 1 lives in an R console, which suits one person. A trial team needs an app in the browser, where several people can ask questions at once without seeing each other’s conversations. This is part two of a five-part … Continue reading: Agents in Production: Build an AI Chat […]
Growing the BiocAsia community
With BiocAsia 2026 coming up in Melbourne, community members have been organising seminars and exploring ways to take part locally. More than 200 people joined the latest BiocAsia seminar on 13 October 2026. The session ran for two and a half ho… Continue reading: Growing the BiocAsia community
Using R to make an “informational video”
I volunteer at my local junior AFL club and my role as club registrar grants access to a sports management platform called PlayHQ. It’s a rich source of data so for the end of the 2026 season, I thought it would be fun to use some of that data to … Continue reading: Using R […]
Using caretS3 with ahead::ctxthetaf for Time Series Forecasting
A demonstration of using caretS3 models for time series forecasting with ahead::ctxthetaf. Continue reading: Using caretS3 with ahead::ctxthetaf for Time Series Forecasting
Free AI and Data Courses with 365 Data Science: Unlimited Access until Nov. 20
Free AI and Data Courses with 365 Data Science: Unlimited Access until Nov. 20 365 Data Science opens its doors this November 100% for free! From November 5 to November 20, 2026, enjoy unlimited access to the entire platform, including a wide range of R programming courses and projects. This offer features expert-led courses, practical […]
Nuclei, five years later: what a mean Dice hides
In 2020 I trained a U-Net on the 2018 Data Science Bowl nuclei with the first version of this package, watched a Dice score climb during training, and finished the post with four predicted masks on the competition’s test images. Those images ha… Continue reading: Nuclei, five years later: what a mean Dice hides
Postal codes and tessellations
From five imaginary points to a map of Slovenia: postal code areas with Voronoi, giscoR and sf. Continue reading: Postal codes and tessellations
Environmental modelling in your web browser
I recall when the R shiny framework first came out. It suddenly got relatively easy for us ecological modellers and environmental statisticians to turn our R code into web apps. This improved accessibility of complex analyses to more general aud… Continue reading: Environmental modelling in your web browser
Shrink stored models with butcher
Scope Fitted model objects in R often carry more than they need for prediction. A glm object keeps the training data, the fitted values, the residuals, and the environment of its formula. That is fine for a single model. It adds up when resample… Continue reading: Shrink stored models with butcher

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.”