R Top Packages
By Daniel Nicola in R Posts
May 9, 2022
As of today, R
is one of the most popular languages for Data Science. Being so popular, you can find 18872 packages published on CRAN as of today. Not to mention all packages that are being developed and can already be used.
Having mentioned this, you would realise that you can find several packages doing similar things and some being better than others. To make your life easier and thanks to a nice conversation I had with friends/colleagues, here’s a list of the fundamental packages you would need for your day by day Data Science.
The
tidyverse
(check it out here): Not really a package but a collection of packages, includingreadr
to read data files,tidyr
to get your data tidy,dplyr
to manipulate your data andggplot
to create visualizations. Of course there are more but these might be the most used in your daily work.knitr
if you’re thinking on creating reports withRMarkdown
. If you’re planning to mix some languages, you can also take a look atquarto
(here).Shiny
is the way to go if you want to create dashboards and apps. A whole world of applications can be created. You can start with a small app like this (sorry it’s only in spanish). You can also find lots of examples hereplotly
(check it out here) will allow you to create interactive graphs (you can also start with ggplot and convert these graphs withggplotly
).And last but not least, the
tidymodels
framework (check it out here) which you can use to prepare data, create models and summarise results, using thetidyverse
principles.
Of course there might be some useful packages I’ve forgotten (some are included in the tidyverse
) but this list covers most of the things you need to go from zero to hero with data. Start by reading in some data and manipulating it with the tidyverse
packages; train, test and get results from models with tidymodels
; and create cool visualizations (ggplot
and plotly
), dashboards (Shiny
) and reports (knitr
and quarto
) to communicate your results.