I do not usually write posts that are calls to action. But sometimes, something important enough comes along that it would feel wrong to stay silent. This is one of those times. What is EM-DAT? EM-DAT, the Emergency Events Database, is the world’s...

How does the average marathoner pace their race? In this post, we’ll use R to have a look at a large dataset of marathon times to try to answer this question. The ideal strategy would be to “even split” the race. This is where you run continually at the ...

A new version of `unifiedml` is out; available on CRAN. `unifiedml` is an effort to offer a unified interface to R's machine learning models.

Last summer, while relaxing on the beaches of Berck, a French town known for treating tuberculosis in kids by exposing them to the fresh maritime air (back in 19th century, they have antibiotics these days), I found myself daydreaming abou...

Agentic AI tools like Claude Code can write and run code, fix its own errors, and produce a formatted report with figures. I wanted to know whether that translates into reliable ecological modelling, so we ran a test: three fisheries tasks, four...

A little bit less than two years ago, building on work by Jim Hester and Kevin Ushey, Davis Vaughan completed a very impactful JavaScript file for the R community: an R grammar for the Tree-sitter parsing generator. He even got a round of applause for...

March 31 is Transgender Day of Visibility. I’m not transgender myself, but I have friends, acquaintances, and family members who are. Chances are you do too, whether you realize it or not.   &nbs...

Disclaimer: This blog contains opinions that are of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the strategy of their respective organizations. The humble View() and its limits View() has served R programmers well for a long time — pass ...

Introduction AI coding assistants are becoming a natural part of how clinical R programmers work — autocompleting functions, suggesting test cases, drafting derivations. But out of the box, these agents know nothing about ADaM conventions, CD...

NoteEnd of March is the time when I remember with warm nostalgia the vivid memories of working alongside and learning from Jim Vaupel, who died untimely on 27th March 2022. He was a brilliant demographer and a vital person who radiated lov...

I’m currently on a quest to better know and understand treesitter-based tooling for R. To make it short, treesitter is a tool for parsing code, for instance recognizing what is a function, an argument, a logical in a string of code. With tools bu...

Dear rOpenSci friends, it’s time for our monthly news roundup! You can read this post on our blog. Now let’s dive into the activity at and around rOpenSci! rOpenSci HQ rOpenSci Dev Guide 1.0.0: Trilingual and Improved rOpenSci Software...

The Emergency departments leading the transformation of Alzheimer’s and dementia care (ED-LEAD) study, which I have written about in the past, is approaching the end of its third year. This multifactorial design evaluates three independent, yet potenti...

With the conflict in Iran causing worldwide disruption to energy markets, I have both a work and personal interest in energy supply in Pacific islands, which led me to this blog post. Here I look at just two aspects of energy: electricity generation, a...

📊 Dipping my toes into financial statements — income, balance sheet & cash flow. Still don’t fully get it, but slowly piecing together the story these numbers tell. Warren Buffett makes it look easy 😅 Baby steps! 🌱 Motivations ...

LLM-enhanced momentum investing combines traditional momentum signals with real-time news interpretation by large language models (LLMs). The idea is straightforward: stocks with strong past returns are candidates for momentum portfolios, but their inclusion and weight are refined by LLM-generated sentiment scores derived from firm-specific news. This hybrid approach improves risk-adjusted ...

Over the course of my career as a Data Scientist, I’ve worked on projects ranging from simple code reviews, to large application builds. For the most part, I have used R to do this. If you’re getting into coding or data science, one q...

Two hundred and fifty-five of the new packages submitted to CRAN in February were still there in mid-March. Here are my Top 40 picks in seventeen categories: Artificial Intelligence, Biology, Buddhism, Climate Science, Computational Methods, Dat...

In computational linguistics, word meanings are shaped by their contexts. As the British linguist John Rupert Firth put it in 1957, ‘You shall know a word by the company it keeps’ (see Brunila & LaViolette, 2022, for a re-examination of the intellectual history). It sounds almost like life advice, but Firth meant something ...

Digital Biology with R Digital biology is no longer a niche intersection between biology and computation. It has become a core framework for how modern laboratories, biomedical teams, and translational researchers generate insight from complex biological systems. Whether the objective is to identify gene-expression signatures, model disease progression, classify patient ...

TLDR: To test whether I could tell the difference between decaf coffees I conducted a highly scientific test (subject to […]

Introduction Model tuning and estimation has evolved from simple extrapolation to sophisticated probabilistic modeling frameworks. In contemporary data science, decision-makers require more than estimates, the need for clear statements about likeliho...

As of this week, we are closing our forum at discuss.ropensci.org. The forum has become largely inactive in recent years, so we are consolidating our conversations to our other online spaces to reduce maintenance and moderation burden. We’re not... …

How to install nnetsauce with and without jax for GPU acceleration …

Related (on this site): Install & Use worldfootballR worldfootballR Guide Sports Analytics with R NFL Analytics with R Tennis Analytics with R Boxing Analytics with R Bayesian Sports Analytics (Book/Product) Contents Setup Get match data Feature engineering Model 1: Poisson goals (baseline) Model 2: Dixon–Coles adjustment (improves low scores) From scorelines ... …

A un año de la publicación del artículo sobre Open REDATAM, reflexiono sobre el proceso de publicación, la recepción de los usuarios, la revisión en rOpenSci y los desafíos técnicos y personales. …

Short practical advice on ad measurement: Don’t optimize for CTR alone — The paper shows clicks are a poor proxy for conversions. Across many campaigns, targeting models built on clicks perform no better than random guessing at identifying who... …

Hi pharmaverse community, On behalf of the council we are pleased to announce that Nick Masel will be taking over from Sumesh Kalappurakal as the J&J representative on the Pharmaverse Council. Please join us in thanking Sumesh for his lead...

R DuckDB Parquet Calibration Ranking Bayesian Odds TS Backtesting Racing analytics as an inference-and-decision system Thoroughbred flat racing is not a binary classification problem. It is a multi-competitor outcome process with hierarchy (horse / trainer / jockey / track), time dependence (form cycles, market moves), and decision layers (how you act on probabilities). ... …

This post has been written in collaboration with Joshua Marie. Why this post matters Neural networks in R are no longer niche. Today, we can choose among: {nnet} for classic, small-scale neural nets, {neuralnet} another classic neural nets packag...

Getting files ready for publication can be frustrating when you can’t find the right file, or you realize your figures look like 2000s jpeg. Here’s a list of things I wished I’d done (or my students had done) properly earlier in the paper prep p... …

Jumping Rivers has been approved to sell our services through the Crown Commercial Service CCS. For UK public sector organisations, this is an important milestone. It means there is now a simpler, compliant way to work with us without going throu...

This post is the fourth of a series of (probably) seven on population issues in the Pacific, re-generating the charts I used in a keynote speech before the November 2025 meeting of the Pacific Heads of Planning and Statistics in Wellington, New Zealand...

Recent advances in time series modeling have emphasized the importance of structural breaks—abrupt changes in the underlying dynamics of financial or economic data. The paper “Directional-Shift Dirichlet ARMA Models for Compositional Time Series with Structural Break Intervention” (Katz, 2026) introduces a Bayesian framework that captures these breaks using three interpretable ...

‘patchwork’ integration Aligning rows with flex_body Aligning columns with flex_cols Quarto markdown in cells ‘flextable’ 0.9.11 has recently landed on CRAN. It ships two features we are happy to introduce: ‘patchwork’ integration: aligning...

The Smallest Contribution You’re Probably Not Making You’ve used {admiral} to derive your ADSL. You’ve leaned on {metacore} to wrangle your metadata. You’ve validated your XPT files with {xportr} and scored your package risk with {riskmetric}...

Next week I’m teaching a three‑session, hands‑on introduction to data analysis in R using the tidyverse, hosted by Instats in partnership with the American Statistical Association. We’ll meet February 24–26, from 8–11am PT each day — three focused mornings designed to give participants a clear, modern workflow from ...

Join our workshop on  Oops, Git! How to recover from common mistakes, which is a part of our workshops for Ukraine series!  Here’s some more info:  Title: Oops, Git! How to recover from common mistakes Date: Thursday, March 19th, 14:00 – 16:00 CET (Rome, Berlin, Paris timezone)  Speaker: Maëlle Salmon, with ... …

Place geography, 2025 data, and a major reliability overhaul. …

How BCN combine neural networks and boosting, explained through the knobs you can turn …

Howdy, Phriends! In case you missed it - there is a massive PHUSE Connect coming up soon in Austin, Texas! What’s so massive about it? There’s so much content planned that we’ve extended it by a full day! I guess it’s true what they say - ... …

Table of Contents 1. Introduction to Machine Learning in Sports Analytics Machine Learning has transformed modern sports analytics. What was once limited to box scores and descriptive statistics has evolved into predictive modeling, simulation systems, optimization engines, and automated scouting pipelines. Today, teams, analysts, researchers, and performance departments rely on machine ... …

This post is the third in a (somewhat interrupted) series on population issues in the Pacific, re-generating the charts I used in a keynote speech before the November 2025 meeting of the Pacific Heads of Planning and Statistics in Wellington, New Zeala...

In which I share a crochet analogy for Git commits… Don’t forget your stitch markers! I am happily continuing my crochet learning journey. One lesson I have now internalised is that I should never ever forget or neglect to use stitch markers. Stitch ma... …

Factorial experiments are very common in agriculture and they are usually laid down to test for the significance of interactions between experimental factors. For example, genotype assessments may be performed at two different nitrogen fertilisation...

Introduction I am a massive fan of repositories making binary R packages available. This includes the canonical CRAN repositories, r-universe, r2u, and the Posit (Public) Package Manager, and there are others. R-universe is outstanding because it bu...

This is a follow-up post. If you are interested in other posts of this series, please go to: https://www.statforbiology.com/tags/drcte/. All these posts exapand on a paper that we have recently published in the Journal ‘Weed Science’; please follow ...