The R Data Scientist
Move to buttondown, community, stats, packages
This week's newsletter might look a bit different, as blaze's email sending service has been moved to https://buttondown.com/. This comes with lots of benefits to subscribers including
- searchable newsletter archive at https://rstats.blaze.email
- full-text newsletter RSS feeds at https://rstats.blaze.email/rss
Also new for this week for #rstats fans on bluesky - a standalone bsky account @rstats.blaze.email posting recent updates and R related content.
🌐 Community & Digests
Weekly recap (Oct 17, 2025) (blog.stephenturner.us). Bioconductor on GPUs, Quarto 1.8, Datapalooza 2025 agenda, tidyomics ecosystem, GenAI for data viz with R, polygenic scores in clinical use, AI/biotech policy discussions, and related research highlights
Weekly digest: OA Week, Crossref DOIs and patient involvement in RWD (openpharma.blog). OA Week focus on who owns knowledge; Crossref DOIs explained; Frontiers FAIR² and MetaGraph demo; COS strategy 2026–2028; Pfizer UK podcast on patient partnership in RWD
A Personal Message from an Open Source Contributor (pacha.dev). Open source contributor chronicles delayed government benefits, financial strains, and reliance on community support to sustain R packages and Shiny tooling
📚 Stats & Stories
The boy born on Tuesday: why a simple puzzle bothers me so much (kucharski.substack.com). Explores the Tuesday-boy puzzle, probability intuition, and how rare information shifts 'at least one' reasoning
The UK’s Climate Is Warming — and Extremes Are Increasing (stevenponce.netlify.app). UK summers heat up; extreme heat, rainfall, and frost trends analyzed with LOESS and 95th percentile thresholds
People Analytics: Resources, stories, and teachings from our community (posit.co). Explores people analytics resources, Hangout insights, books, podcasts, and industry 사례 with Posit tools and community perspectives
🧰 Packages & Tools
clitable: a new R package to easily print pretty tables in the terminal (kforner.netlify.app). Karl Forner introduces clitable, an R package for colorful terminal tables, compatible with crayon and cli, with CRAN submission success and examples
gssrdoc Updates (kieranhealy.org). gssr and gssrdoc updates; R packages for GSS data and codebook, pkgdown site, and new gss_doc data frame with list-columns
Futures: Interrupts, Crashes, and Retries (jottr.org). Futures handles evaluation interrupts, crashes, and retries in the future package with automatic worker restarts and retry logic
📃 Authoring & Visuals
Quarto Wizard 1.0.0: Democratising Quarto Extension Management (quarto.org). Quarto Wizard 1.0.0 provides a GUI for installing and managing Quarto extensions and templates in VS Code and Positron
RPweave: Unified R + Python + LaTeX System (thierrymoudiki.github.io). RPweave unifies R, Python, and LaTeX for reproducible research using knitr, Reticulate, uv, and a Makefile-driven workflow
D3po 1.0.0 is here! (pacha.dev). D3po 1.0.0 releases for R and Shiny templates, enabling interactive charts with D3 v7+ and exportable SVG/PNG
📊 Applied Modelling
Compositional modeling of plant communities with Dirichlet regression (ecogambler.netlify.app). Dirichlet regression with Gaussian process smooths for plant-community composition across elevation and temperature using brms and Hilbert-space GP approximations
Inequality and homicide, within-country and between country (freerangestats.info). Inequality and homicide modeled with mixed effects, AR(1); Gini vs homicide across and within countries using World Bank data
Cycles in Lynx Numbers (datawookie.dev). Lynx cycle data, Elton and Nicholson, HBC records, Textract extraction, Table 4 vs Figure 7 plots
🧪 Methods & Tutorials
Tutorial Paper on Movement Tracking of Psychological Processes Using mousestrap (jmbh.github.io). Tutorial on movement tracking of psychological processes using mousestrap and the mousetrap R package for design, data processing, and analysis
Part2 of More data (> 150 files) on T. Moudiki’s situation: a riddle/puzzle (including R, Python, bash interfaces to the game – but everyone can play) (thierrymoudiki.github.io). R, Python, and Bash interfaces to a data puzzle about T. Moudiki, with password puzzle and conformal/predictive modeling references
Two New Preprints on Multilevel Hidden Markov Models (jmbh.github.io). Two preprints on multilevel hidden Markov models: a gentle intro with reproducible EMA tutorial and a simulation study evaluating software performance
📚 Academic Research
postcard: An R Package for Marginal Effect Estimation with or without Prognostic Score Adjustment (arxiv:stat). Introduces postcard, an R package for marginal treatment-effect estimation with prognostic score adjustment and conservative power approximation. Useful for trial analysis and reproducible R workflows
Differentially Private Linear Regression and Synthetic Data Generation with Statistical Guarantees (arxiv:stat). Presents a Gaussian-DP bias-corrected linear regression estimator with valid CIs and a synthetic-data generation pipeline, aiding privacy-preserving inference and reproducible social-science analyses
Scalable Bayesian inference for high-dimensional mixed-type multivariate spatial data (arxiv:stat). Develops Bayesian modeling for high-dimensional mixed-type multivariate spatial data using Vecchia approximations for scalable inference. Benefits R users doing spatial Bayesian analysis with Stan-like workflows
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