Sooner or later, most R programmers end up with code that no longer runs because of package updates. One way to address the problem was the MRAN Time Machine which Microsoft retired on July 1, 2023. You can get similar functionality for source packages using “dateback,” thanks to Ryota Suzuki. As with MRAN, examples of when you could benefit from using dateback include: Checking the reproducibility of old code without pre-archived R packages. Returning your code to an older state when everything was fine. Needing to work on an older version of R, on which recent versions of some packages do n ..read more

Are attending this year’s Joint Statistical Meetings in Toronto? If so, stop by booth 404 to see the latest features of BlueSky Statistics. A menu-based graphical user interface for the R language, BlueSky lets people access the power of R without having to learn to program. Programmers can easily add code to BlueSky’s menus, sharing their expertise with non-programmers. My detailed review of BlueSky is here, a brief comparison to other R GUIs is here, and the BlueSky User Guide is here. I hope to see you in Toronto! The post See BlueSky Statistics GUI for R at JSM 2023 first appeared on r4sta ..read more

I’ve updated The Popularity of Data Science Software‘s market share estimates based on scholarly articles. I posted it below, so you don’t have to sift through the main article to read the new section. Scholarly Articles Scholarly articles provide a rich source of information about data science tools. Because publishing requires significant effort, analyzing the type of data science tools used in scholarly articles provides a better picture of their popularity than a simple survey of tool usage. The more popular a software package is, the more likely it will appear in scholarly publications as ..read more

At the useR! 2022 Conference, the world-renowned Mayo Clinic announced that after 20 years of using SAS Institute’s JMP software, they have migrated to the BlueSky Statistics user interface for R. Ross Dierkhising, a principal biostatistician with the Clinic, described the process. They reviewed 16 commercial statistical software packages and none met their needs as well as JMP. Then they investigated three graphical user interface for the powerful R language: BlueSky Statistics, jamovi, and JASP. They found BlueSky meet their needs as well as JMP, for significantly less cost. Then Mayo’s sta ..read more

BlueSky Statistics is an easy-to-use menu system that uses the R language to do all its work. My detailed review of BlueSky is available here, and a brief comparison of the various menu systems for R is here. I’ve just released the BlueSky Statistics 7.1 User Guide in printed form on the world’s largest independent bookstore, Lulu.com. A description and detailed table of contents are available here. Cover design by Kiran Rafiq. I’ve also released the BlueSky Statistics 7.1 Intro Guide. It is a complete subset of the User Guide, and you can download it for free here (if you have trouble downloa ..read more

The BlueSky Statistics graphical user interface (GUI) for the R language has added quite a few new features (described below). I’m also working on a BlueSky User Guide, a draft of which you can read about and download here. [Update: don’t download that, get the full Intro Guide download instead.] Although I’m spending a lot of time on BlueSky, I still plan to be as obsessive as ever about reviewing all (or nearly all) of the R GUIs, which is summarized here. The new data management features in BlueSky are: Date Order Check — this lets you quickly check across the dates stored in many variabl ..read more

Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) for the R language help beginners get started learning R, help non-programmers get their work done, and help teams of programmers and non-programmers work together by turning code into menus and dialog boxes. There has been quite a lot of progress on R GUIs since my last post on this topic. Below I describe some of the features added to several R GUIs. BlueSky Statistics BlueSky Statistics has added mixed-effects linear models. Its dialog shows an improved model builder that will be rolled out to the other modeling dialogs in future releases. Other new statisti ..read more

By Bob Hoyt & Bob Muenchen Data science is being used in many ways to improve healthcare and reduce costs. We have written a textbook, Introduction to Biomedical Data Science, to help healthcare professionals understand the topic and to work more effectively with data scientists. The textbook content and data exercises do not require programming skills or higher math. We introduce open source tools such as R and Python, as well as easy-to-use interfaces to them such as BlueSky Statistics, jamovi, R Commander, and Orange. Chapter exercises are based on healthcare data, and supplemental YouT ..read more

The WPS Analytics’ version of the SAS language is now available in a Community Edition. This edition allows you to run SAS code on datasets of any size for free. Purchasing a commercial license will get you tech support and the ability to run it from the command line, instead of just interactively. The software license details are listed in this table. While the WPS version of the SAS language doesn’t do everything the version from SAS Institute offers, it does do quite a lot. The complete list of features is available here. Back in 2009, the SAS Institute filed a lawsuit against the cre ..read more

Introduction R AnalyticFlow (RAF) is a free and open source graphical user interface (GUI) for the R language that focuses on beginners looking to point-and-click their way through analyses.  What sets it apart from the other half-dozen GUIs for R is that it uses a flowchart-like workflow diagram to control the analysis instead of only menus. In my first programming class back in the Pleistocene Era, my professor told us to never begin a program without doing a flowchart of what you were trying to accomplish. With workflow tools, you get the benefit of the diagram outlining the big pictur ..read more