

R packages I wish I'd known about earlier - glamp
http://blog.yhathq.com/posts/10-R-packages-I-wish-I-knew-about-earlier.html

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cschmidt
For some reason, I find it harder to find what I'm looking for in the R help
than just about any other language. That's why you end up not knowing about
useful packages for a very long time. Is that just me?

~~~
rcthompson
There's an R-specific search engine called Rseek: <http://www.rseek.org/>

It's still not perfect, because if you don't know the right keyword for a
concept you might not get what you're looking for. But it's pretty good.

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hablahaha
This article should really just be called "Everyone should just follow
Hadley's Github". Actually, someone should write that.

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EzGraphs
If you want to do any sort of stock analysis, quantmod is really great as it
bundles a number of other related packages with financial application
together: <http://www.quantmod.com/>.

If you have to deal with directed graphs, iGraph
<http://igraph.sourceforge.net/>.

 _Related Blog Posts_

<http://www.r-chart.com/2010/06/stock-analysis-using-r.html>

[http://www.r-chart.com/2010/06/analyze-twitter-data-
using-r....](http://www.r-chart.com/2010/06/analyze-twitter-data-using-r.html)

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drags
ddply can be very slow. Strongly recommended to get your data into the form
you want in something map-reduce-y _then_ throw it into R for analysis and
graphing.

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jme3
I never cease to be amazed at how people who work with data large enough to
make tools like plyr slow assume that everyone works with data like that.

I have been using R daily for 7-8 years now and have only occasionally turned
to somethig like data.table for performance reasons. "Big data" receives waaay
more attention and hype than there are actual human beings working on data of
that scale. I can assure you that for the vast majority of R users world wide
plyr is plenty fast enough for their needs.

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santa_boy
data.table deserves a mention here too. It simplifies and speeds up dataframe
operations

see ?data.table

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crayola
Absolutely. The improvements to code and performance are really spectacular.

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felixr
Caret (<http://caret.r-forge.r-project.org/>) is another package that should
make the list, if you are using machine learning packages in R.

Caret gives you a common interface to you use a huge list of classifiers.
Plus, it has some nice functions for data preparation.

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phillc73
The list of database connectors should also include RSQLite:

<http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/RSQLite/index.html>

A really useful article though. I'm going to investigate RandomForest.

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danso
If only all such lists could include example code and visualizations, very
nicely done. Thanks!

~~~
glamp
thanks if you like the visuals, check out Hadley's talk at google
[http://www.r-bloggers.com/engineering-data-analysis-with-
r-a...](http://www.r-bloggers.com/engineering-data-analysis-with-r-and-
ggplot2-%E2%80%93-a-google-tech-talk-given-by-hadley-wickham/)

