The ‘Editorial’ article from the 2015-2 issue.
On behalf of the editorial board, I am pleased to publish Volume 7, Issue 2 of the R Journal. This issue contains 20 contributed research articles and several contributions to the News and Notes section.
In the Contributed Research Articles section each of the articles presents an R package or new features of an existing R package which was extended. The articles cover different specialized statistical modeling tools, e.g., for regression with different distributions for the dependent variable, such as implemented by packages zoib for zero/one inflated beta regression and hermite for the generalized Hermite distribution, or different data structures as provided by packages hglm for conditional and simultaneous autoregressive spatial models and apc for age-period-cohort analysis. In addition tools for program evaluation are provided by package pampe and quantization-based quantile regression by package QuantifQuantile. Other aspects of statistical modeling are to perform variable selection or variable grouping and are covered for example by packages VSURF, BSGS and ClustVarLV or to determine dissimilarities between observations with special data structures as provided by packages treeClust and mmpp.
Other areas in applied statistics, e.g., to determine optimal designs, suitable sample sizes or perform uncertainty and sensitivity analysis are covered by packages ALTopt, PracTools and mtk. Diagnostic tools for approximate Bayesian computation are provided by package abctools; tools for dealing with multilabel datasets are contained in package mldr. Visualization methods for pairwise comparisons, which are for example used when comparing algorithms in machine learning, are given in package SRCS.
In addition new areas of application of R are seized, e.g., by package rivr which provides the tools for undergraduate and graduate courses in open-channel hydraulics. Infrastructure in the area of numerical mathematics for evaluating the hypergeometric function is given in package hypergeo and tools to help with coding in R are contained in package GUIProfiler for profiling R code.
Overall this collection of contributed research articles indicates the wide range of statistical methods from different areas currently covered by extension packages for R and the increasing possible use of R in new areas of application.
In addition the News and Notes section contains news by the R Consortium and the R Foundation providing some background information to the setting up of the Consortium and its interaction with the R Foundation. In addition a conference report on useR! 2015, the annual international R user conference, which took place from June 30 until July 3, 2015 in Aalborg, Denmark and attracted 660 participants from 42 countries is given. Furthermore this section contains the usual updates on the Bioconductor project, changes in R itself and CRAN. I hope you enjoy the issue.
With the end of the year, it is also time for a refresh of the editorial board. Deepayan Sarkar is leaving the board after a four-year term. We welcome John Verzani who is joining the editorial board in his place. Publishing this issue is my last act as Editor-in-Chief, with Michael Lawrence taking over the job for the next year.
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Text and figures are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 4.0. The figures that have been reused from other sources don't fall under this license and can be recognized by a note in their caption: "Figure from ...".
For attribution, please cite this work as
Grün, "Editorial", The R Journal, 2015
BibTeX citation
@article{RJ-2015-2-editorial,
author = {Grün, Bettina},
title = {Editorial},
journal = {The R Journal},
year = {2015},
note = {https://rjournal.github.io/},
volume = {7},
issue = {2},
issn = {2073-4859},
pages = {4-4}
}