There are already a lot of great resources1 that teach you how to make an R package. But I thought it would still be worthwhile to walk through how I created my first one – at the very least, it’ll be helpful for myself when I write my next R package. Here is my step-by-step guide to building a (minimally functional) R package. Step 1: Set up your packages and directory To create your own R package, you will need to use two packages, devtools and roxygen2.

I often use R Markdown for my research projects or any kind of data analysis (if you’re familiar with Python, they are similar to Jupyter notebooks). There are many advantages to using R Markdown over writing R scripts. One of the major ones is the ease with which it allows me to turn my work into something presentable for my advisor or other collaborators. By using R Markdown, I don’t have to track down a bunch of plots and files or really do any additional work to organize them.

Last week, I attended JSM (Joint Statistical Meetings) in Denver. It was my first conference ever, so I made sure to record down my thoughts. Since I wasn’t presenting at this conference, I had the luxury of being able to attend sessions without feeling anxious. And that was really great because I think getting to see what conferences are like before I present at one makes it less intimidating.

I just finished my second year in the PhD program, which means 2 years of writing a lot of R code. Today, I wanted to share some useful (and perhaps lesser known) R packages that I use. pacman for loading packages This package contains an awesome function called p_load. I prefer the concise way it lets you load packages, as opposed to writing library(package) over and over again.

I’ve been taking probability theory this year and I noticed that a lot of proofs will assume that the reader already knows some commonly used “tricks.” If you aren’t familiar with them, it can be hard to follow the proofs in the textbook,1 let alone prove it yourself. I felt like this was happening to me a lot, so in an effort to better familiarize myself, I’ve written down some useful tips and tricks, along with explanations and/or examples.