The R Data Scientist logo

The R Data Scientist

Archives
Subscribe
December 9, 2025

The R Data Scientist 09-12-2025

R's growth in Latin America and Pakistan, accessible Shiny apps, new tools, visualizations, and key updates in AI




🌍 R Community & Events

LatinR <- Latinamerican Conference About the Use of R in R&D 2025 (ropensci​.org). LatinR 2025 conference on the use of R in R&D with tutorials, talks by rOpenSci members and Latin American researchers

A First for Pakistan: Karachi R User Group Builds R Ecosystem from Scratch (r-consortium​.org). Karachi R User Group grows from 2023 by hosting online events, expanding to 500+ members, with Quarto, ggplot2, and international speakers

Social Coworking and Office Hours - Getting to know The Carpentries (ropensci​.org). Social coworking and office hours focusing on getting to know The Carpentries with Angelique Trusler and Steffi LaZerte

The Test Set: Now on YouTube + a look at what’s next (posit​.co). The Test Set, Posit's data science video podcast, is now on YouTube with future guests and 2026 lineup

Make Your Shiny Apps Accessible to Everyone – Free Jumping Rivers Webinar! (jumpingrivers​.com). Free 55-minute webinar teaching accessible Shiny apps using inclusivity, standards, and practical techniques


📰 R & AI Newsletters

R Weekly 2025-W50 New AI Newsletter, Test Set on Youtube, Haskell for Data Science (rweekly​.org). New AI newsletter, YouTube Test Set, Haskell for Data Science, Shiny plots, and R ecosystem updates

Weekly Recap (December 4, 2025) (blog​.stephenturner​.us). Weekly recap covering R updates, Posit open source investments, AI in academia and biology, funding cuts, bedder bedtools, and recent papers

2025-12-05 AI Newsletter (posit​.co). Posit highlights AI news, Databricks collaboration, model pricing insights, and tools for R, Python, and notebooks across RStudio, Jupyter, and VS Code

Ready for 4 2025-12-03: More Databot, and Package Management (buttondown​.com/ready4r). Databot review and exploration of rv and uv package managers for R and Python dependency management


🧰 R Tooling & Infrastructure

Procesa datos con R sin programar y de forma interactiva (bastianoleah​.netlify​.app). Interactively process data in R with block-based GUI using blockr for data manipulation and visualization

New release of maplegend: version 0.4.0 (rcarto​.github​.io). maplegend 0.4.0 adds histo legends, aspect-ratio support, and decimal/big-separator controls for R graphics

dplyr and Oracle database with DatabaseConnector and JDBC on Windows (guillaumepressiat​.github​.io). Using JDBC and DatabaseConnector with R, dplyr, and Oracle on Windows for cross-bitness database access

Simplicity of a Database, but the Speed of a Cache: OLAP Caches for DuckDB (motherduck​.com). Caching OLAP with DuckDB extensions like QuackStore, cache_httpfs, and DiskCache to speed dashboards


📊 Applied R Visualizations

Pet cats rest 70–80% of the day regardless of season (stevenponce​.netlify​.app). Makeover Monday redesign using R, ggplot2, and tidiverse to compare cat resting behavior across seasons

Nightlife of Barcelona Neighborhoods (jmsallan​.netlify​.app). Analyzes Barcelona nightlife by neighborhoods using sf, BAdatasetsSpatial, tidyverse, and kableExtra in R

Net migration in Pacific island countries (freerangestats​.info). R for data wrangling and ggplot2 visualisations of Pacific net migration using UN 2024 data, focusing on Fiji, PNG, Samoa and others with Peter Ellis

What’s In The Box: Wrapped but not streamed 2025 (quantixed​.org). R and XML parsing of iTunes libraries to compute 2025 listening stats, plus ggplot visualisations and album recommendations

Analyzing my music listening data with Databot (simonpcouch​.com). Explores analyzing Apple Music library.xml with Databot in Positron using tidyverse to extract Play Count and identify top tracks

Gráfico exploratorio para el Sistema de Indicadores y Estándares Territoriales (bastianoleah​.netlify​.app). Exploratory chart placing Chile’s 346 communes by potable water access and paved road network, using urban, mixed, and rural classifications


🧪 R for Research & Open Science

freeCount Bioinformatics Analysis Apps on Posit Cloud (morphoscape​.wordpress​.com). FreeCount R Shiny apps on Posit Cloud for bioinformatics data analysis using GitHub-hosted project and guided deployment

Expanded FDA eCTD File Format Support for R Packages — A Milestone Achieved Through Industry–FDA Collaboration (r-consortium​.org). FDA expands accepted R file formats for eCTD submissions, enabling direct .zip and R packaging with open-source encouragement

CMiNet: Building Reliable Microbiome Networks Through Consensus. (methodsblog​.com). CMiNet builds consensus microbiome networks by integrating multiple tools (SparCC, SPIEC-EASI, SPRING) via an R package and Shiny app for reliable, reproducible interactions

Introducing openESM: A database of openly available experience sampling datasets including R/Python interface (jmbh​.github​.io). OpenESM harmonizes openly available experience sampling datasets with R and Python interfaces for robust, cross-study analyses

Research Integrity in an Era of AI and Massive Amounts of Data (sensible-med​.com). Massive data, AI in medicine, and replication challenges; calls for registration, AI-assisted peer review, and robust governance


📈 Statistical Methods & Inference

Frequently Asked Questions (metafor-project​.org). Meta-analysis in R with metafor: validation, implementations, and statistical details in Higgins–Thompson theory and RF-based methods

New Preprint: Model Checking for Vector Autoregressive Models (jmbh​.github​.io). Tutorial on VAR model checking with diagnostics, plots, simulations, and R-code for multilevel VAR in psychological time series

Dogmatic Bayesianism Disorder (daniellakens​.blogspot​.com). Humorous critique of dogmatic Bayesianism framed as a fictional DSM-5 style disorder in an academic statistics blog post

Gaussian mixture via continuous sparse regularization (xianblog​.wordpress​.com). Gaussian mixtures with diagonal covariances estimated via continuous sparse regularization and BLASSO using point processes

Bayesian Decision Agents: The Next Frontier in Real-Time Risk Intelligence (magazine​.amstat​.org). Bayesian decision agents, real-time risk intelligence, and tools like Stan, PyMC, and Python for decision making

Modest replication probabilities of p-values–desirable, not regrettable: a note from Stephen Senn (errorstatistics​.com). Stephen Senn discusses replication probabilities of p-values and their interpretation in error statistics and inference

The perplexing “connected cluster axiom” (skewed​.de). Explores why the connected-cluster axiom is flawed in SBM-based community detection and its implications for inference


📚 Academic Research

DeeDeeExperiment: Building an infrastructure for integrating and managing omics data analysis results in R/Bioconductor (arxiv:q-bio). DeeDeeExperiment introduces an R/Bioconductor S4 class unifying multi-omics differential expression and enrichment results. R users gain a reproducible container simplifying contrasts, metadata and workflows analysis

Eye of the Beholder: Towards Measuring Visualization Complexity (arxiv:cs). Crowdsourced ratings link human-perceived visualization complexity to image metrics, manual annotation and zero-shot GPT-4o-mini feature extraction. Results suggest LLMs approximate complexity and guide visualization design

The Bag-and-Whisker Plot: A New Bagplot for Bivariate Data (arxiv:stat). The bag-and-whisker plot refines bivariate boxplots using multiple-testing-based fences and granular whiskers for robust, sample-size-adaptive outlier detection. R users gain multivariate diagnostics and stabler graphics

When are novel methods for analyzing complex chemical mixtures in epidemiology beneficial? (arxiv:stat). Extensive simulations compare generalized linear models with novel chemical-mixture methods for estimating health effects under varying correlation and interaction structures. Results guide epidemiologic method choice

Generalised Bayesian Inference using Robust divergences for von Mises-Fisher distribution (arxiv:stat). The authors develop robust Bayesian estimators for von Mises–Fisher directional data using density-power and gamma divergences with weighted Bayesian bootstrap computation. Supports outlier-resistant spherical modeling

👋 Before you go...

I've got a big favor to ask - keeping Blaze running isn't expensive, but it does all add up, so I'm asking readers like you to help, if you can, by joining the Patreon page. Nothing flashy, just a way for folks who find value in these newsletters to chip in a little each month.

If you are getting value from blaze, checking this out would mean the absolute world. But if you can't contribute, no worries - the newsletters keep coming either way. Thanks for reading and being part of this nerdy corner of the internet. All the best for the coming week - Alastair.

Don't miss what's next. Subscribe to The R Data Scientist:

Add a comment:

Share this email:
Share on LinkedIn Share on Hacker News Share on Mastodon Share on Bluesky
Bluesky
Mastodon
LinkedIn
Powered by Buttondown, the easiest way to start and grow your newsletter.