Category Archives: programming
Easy data validation with the validate package
The validate package is our attempt to make checking data against domain knowledge as easy as possible. Here is an example. library(magrittr) library(validate) iris %>% check_that( Sepal.Width > 0.5 * Sepal.Length , mean(Sepal.Width) > 0 , if ( Sepal.Width > … Continue reading
settings 0.2.3
An updated version of the settings package has been accepted on CRAN. The settings package provides alternative options settings management for R. It is aimed to allow for layered options management where global options are the default that can easily … Continue reading
stringdist 0.9.4 and 0.9.3: distances between integer sequences
A new release of stringdist has been accepted on CRAN. stringdist offers a number of popular distance functions between sequences of integers or characters that are independent of character encoding. version 0.9.4 bugfix: edge case for zero-size for lower tridiagonal … Continue reading
Stringdist 0.9.2: dist objects, string similarities and some deprecated arguments
On 24-06-2015 stringdist 0.9.2 was accepted on CRAN. A summary of new features can be found in the NEWS file; here I discuss the changes with some examples. Computing 'dist' objects with 'stringdistmatrix' The R dist object is used as … Continue reading
stringdist 0.9: exercise all your cores
The latest release of the stringdist package for approximate text matching has two performance-enhancing novelties. First of all, encoding conversion got a lot faster since this is now done from C rather than from R. Secondly, stringdist now employs multithreading … Continue reading
Easy to use option settings management with the 'settings' package
Last week I released a new package called settings. It grew out of my frustration built up during several small projects where I'm generating heavily parameterized d3/js output. What I wanted was support to define a whole bunch of option … Continue reading
stringdist 0.8: now with soundex
An update to the stringdist package was released earlier this month. Thanks to a contribution of Jan van der Laan the package now includes a method to compute soundex codes as defined here. Briefly, soundex encoding aims to translate words … Continue reading
sort.data.frame
I came accross this post on SO, where several solutions to sorting data.frames are presented. It must have been solved a million times, but here's a solution I like to use. It benefits from the fact that sort is an … Continue reading
Review of "Building interactive graphs with ggplot2 and shiny"
Recently, Packt published a video course with the above title, and I've just spent a pleasant morning reviewing it on Packt's request. Pleasant, because I think the course gives an excellent introduction to both ggplot2 and shiny. The course is … Continue reading
A bit of benchmarking with string distances
After my last post about the stringdist package, Zachary Mayer pointed out to me that the implementation of the Levenshtein and Jaro-Winkler distances implemented in the RecordLinkage package are about two-three times faster. His benchmark compares randomly generated character strings … Continue reading