I like to standardize the column names of data I’m reading into R so that I don’t have to match column names from one dataset that has an i.d. column and another that has an id column or maybe an ID column. Keep it simple: lower case with a single underscore separator between words.

It’s a common situation: you want to code and debug in R *and* leverage RMarkdown for a presentation or document.

The challenge: file paths.

Executing code in the console and from within a saved RMarkdown document typically requires distinct file paths to locate data files.

When processing data downloaded from popular survey engines, it’s not uncommon for multiple choice questions to be represented as one column per possible response coded as 0/1. So, a question with just two responses might be downloaded as part of a CSV with one column for q1_1 and another for q1_2. If the responses are mutually exclusive, then (q1_1 == 0 iff q1_2 == 1) and (q1_1 == 1 iff q1_2 == 0). If the responses are part of a “choose all that apply” question, then it’s possible to have multiple 1s.

How can these individual binary indicator variables be reassembled into a single response variable?

Here are a few of the more commonly used notations found in R code and documentation that confuse coders of any skill level who are new to R.
Continue reading Common Uncommon Notations that Confuse New R Coders →

Pipes have been a fundamental aspect of computer programming for many decades. In short, the semantics of pipes can be thought of as taking the output from the left-hand side and passing it as input to the right-hand side. For example, in a linux shell, you might cat example.txt | sort | uniq to take the contents of a text file, then sort the rows, then take one copy of each distinct value. | is a common, but not universal, pipe operator and on U.S. Qwerty keyboards, is found above the RETURN key along with the backslash: \.

Languages that don’t begin by supporting pipes often eventually implement some version of them. In R, the magrittr package introduced the %>% infix operator as a pipe operator and is most often pronounced as “then”. For example, “take the mtcars data.frame, THEN take the head of it, THEN…” and so on.

Continue reading Writing Pipe-friendly Functions →

• Everything that exists in R is an object ~ John M. Chambers
• Everything that happens in R is the result of a function call ~ John M. Chambers
• Names have objects; objects don’t have names ~ Hadley Wickham

So, what are the implications of these statements?

Continue reading Three Deep Truths About R →

Checking whether an item is in a vector or not in a vector is a common task. The notation in R is a little inelegant when expressing the “not in” condition since the negation operator (!) is separated from the comparison operator (%in%):

5 %in% c(1, 2, 3, 4, 5)  # TRUE
!5 %in% c(1, 2, 3, 4, 5) # FALSE

R is a language where you can easily extend the set of built in operators:

`%!in%` <-
  function(needle, haystack) {
    !(needle %in% haystack)
  }

Now, I can express my intentions reasonably clearly with my new, compact, infix operator %!in%:

5 %in% c(1, 2, 3, 4, 5)  # TRUE
5 %!in% c(1, 2, 3, 4, 5) # FALSE

Moral: bend your tools to your will, not the other way ’round.

Often, your R code will rely on having one or more R packages available. A little defensive coding will save users of your code—including future-you—from having to figure out which packages you’re using and then having to manually install them. This lowers the extraneous cognitive load associated with running older or unfamiliar code.

if (!"tidyverse" %in% installed.packages()) install.package("tidyverse", deps = TRUE)

Or, if you prefer to always use blocks with IF statements:

if (!"tidyverse" %in% installed.packages()) {
  install.package("tidyverse", deps = TRUE)
}

With a little persistence, you can extend this to dealing with multiple packages:

pkgs <- c("tidyverse", "openxlsx")
install.packages(pkgs[!pkgs %in% installed.packages()], deps = TRUE)

Download and install R. Download and install RStudio. Read R for Data Science.

R provides the backend: the programming language specification and the interpreter.

RStudio provides the frontend: the user interface that allows you to interact with R, visualize data, and manage the files associated with your analyses.

R for Data Science introduces you to the tidyverse way of programming. There are basically methods of programming in R: “base R”, which has been around since the R language was first conceived (and before, since R is itself based on the S language), and the tidyverse, a newer approach that focuses on leveraging a consistent structure to your data and developing a grammar for data ingest, data wrangling, data visualization, and data storage.

Base R tends to be dense in meaning where the Tidyverse tends to be consistent and to breakdown complex processes into a set of discrete steps:

mtcars[2, "cyl"]

library(tidyverse)
mtcars %>%
  select(cyl) %>%
  slice(2)

mtcars[mtcars$cyl == 4, c("hp", "mpg")]

library(tidyverse)
mtcars %>%
  filter(cyl == 4) %>%
  select(hp, mpg)

Functions are first class objects in R. Functions establish closures also known in R as environments. So, you can use functions to create other functions in creative ways.

Here, I’ve written a function called divisor that returns a function that checks whether a given input, d, is evenly divisible by number and if so, returns string. Then I use divisor to create a test for divisibility by 3 and another for divisibility by 5.

Problem: Given a range of positive, non-zero integers, output “Fizz” if the number is evenly divisible by 3, output “Buzz” if the number is evenly divisible by 5, and output “FizzBuzz” if the number is evenly divisible by both 3 and 5; otherwise, output the number.

Solution:

divisor <-
  function(number, string) {
    function(d) {
      if (d %% number == 0) string else ""
    }
  }

mod3er <- divisor(3, "Fizz")
mod5er <- divisor(5, "Buzz")

fizzbuzz <- 
  function(i) {
    res <- paste0(mod3er(i), mod5er(i))
    ifelse(res == "", i, res)
  }

sapply(1:100, fizzbuzz)