Editorial

The ‘Editorial’ article from the 2016-2 issue.

On behalf of the editorial board, I am pleased to publish Volume 8, Issue 2 of the R Journal. This issue contains 33 contributed research articles. Each of them either presents an R package, a specific extension of an R package or applications using R packages available from the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN, http:://CRAN.R-project.org). This issue highlights the breadth and depth of the R package ecosystem, covering advances in statistical computing and visualization, as well as novel applications of R in specific domains. The authors have described a small but representative sample of the now more than 11000 packages distributed through CRAN and Bioconductor.

As usual the bulk of this issue presents advancements in the field of applied statistics, including multipleNCC for inverse probability weighting of nested case-control data, SimCorMultRes for simulating correlated categorical responses, Qtools for quantile inference, and MLCIRTwithin for discovering latent traits in questionnaire responses. The CAVariants package implements multiple methods for correspodence analysis, and hdm provides tools for computing uncertainty in high-dimensional, sparse models. There are articles describing how to analyze normal tolerance intervals with the tolerance package, perform associated kernel estimation using ake, evaluate principal surrages with pseval, find subgroups using evolutionary fuzzy methods implemented in SDEFSR, and use the distance covariance function to analyze time series data with dCovTS. Further articles describe quantreg.nonpar for quantile regression with non-parametric series, micompr for multivariate independent comparison of observations, WeDiBaDis for weighted discrimant analysis, TSDist for computing distances for time series, condSURV for estimating conditional survival functions, and mctest for testing collinearity between regressors.

We are fortunate to present a number of data visualization packages including: rnrfa for viewing data from the UK National River Flow Archive, easyROC, a GUI for analyzing ROC curves, geozoo for generating libraries of high-dimensional shapes, and ggfortify for getting data into shape for plotting.

Researchers continue to find new ways to apply R to scientific pursuits, including QPot for understanding how stochasticity affects systems of differential equations, nmfgpu4R for large scale non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) using GPUs, and the units package for computing on scientific units. Applications to biology include TRONCO for modeling tumor progression and ACSNMineR for detecting module enrichment and depletion. Other applications include diverse for analyzing diversity in complex systems, comf for analyzing thermal comfort data, water for estimating evapotranspiration from satellite images, eiCompare for comparing ecological inference estimates, particularly in the context of analyzing voting patterns, mixtox for assessing the toxicity of chemical mixtures, tigris for accessing geographic data from the US Census, and rPref for computing Pareto frontiers, useful for implementing preference-based database queries.

In addition the News and Notes section contains the usual updates on the R Foundation, CRAN and the Bioconductor project.

I hope you enjoy the issue.

Note

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