Visualization of R-Workflow through Flowchart in Alteryx-Way - r

I'm wondering if there are any packages for R which help to visualize workflows/code in a way Alteryx does. I find the visualization of the workflows within Alteryx quite helpful, but manually dragging an dropping the tools onto the canvas and set the parameters just takes so much longer than just writing the code in R. Also some functionally within Alteryx is not yet sufficient and has to be implemented via the R/Python-Tool anyway.
During my search I found this post which goes into the same direction, but the suggested packages don't really match what I am looking for.
Best regards

Related

What are the different ways to update an Excel sheet from R

I am in the process of automating a number of graphs that are produced where I work through R that are currently in Excel.
Note that for now, I am not able to convince that doing the graphs directly in R is the best solution, so the solution cannot be "use ggplot2", although I will push for it.
So in the meantime, my path is to download, update and tidy data in R, then export it to an existing Excel file where the graph is already constructed.
The way I have been trying to do that is through openxlsx, which seems to be the most frequent recommendation (for instance here).
However, I am encountering an issue taht I cannot solve with this way (I asked a question there that did not inspire a lot of answers !).
Therefore, I am going to try other ways, but I seem to mainly be directed to the aforementioned solution. What are the existing alternatives ?

improving rGL HTML performance with multiple figures (mfrow3d) + rglWidgets

i am using RGL to produce a panel of multiple figures through the mfrow3d command.
for the most part, the html produced from the call to writeWebGL is exemplary.
the one caveat is that for multiple figures (be it 6 or 16), i have noticed a bit of lag when attempting to manipulate any one of these figures (to pan/zoom/look around).
an example can be found here: http://fluxions.dydx.ie:1338/schiz.html (warning, 100MB html file haha).
i wanted to ask people here if there is anything i can do in terms of using the "reuse" argument that may speed up performance.
additionally, i wanted to ask if there is any benefit to using rglWidgets and if there is a small example someone could provide in porting a writeWebGL call produced from the following:
https://johnmuschelli.com/WebGL_Interactive_Paper/supp_1/supp_1_wrap.Rmd
to rglwidgets (in hopes that the reuse argument in widgets may improve performance due to my use of mfrow3d).
i am not familiar on how to capture a multi-figure layout with multiple calls to contour3d as a scene that widgets can use.
dr duncan murdoch has gotten back to me and said there probably is not a way to do this, so i guess i will close it.
he is very helpful and i thank him for his support.

Downloading Package "Cart" in R

Does anybody know where I can download the R package "cart" that can help create Gastner's
"Mapping with Diffusion-based Cartograms" ? I tried a install.package on R and says it's not available
for R 2.15. There is a page on R-forge about it but it doesn't explain how to download the package.
Thanks.
Way late to the game, but from what I can tell there's not much happening for the cart package; my recent efforts with cartogramming in R have pushed me towards two alternatives: Rcartogram within R (available from the GitHub repository) and ScapeToad, a program written in JS.
Advantage of the former is that you don't have to leave R (better for long-term project management), however it's a bit arcane to use (requires converting your shapefile to a density grid & then figuring out how to use an interpolation method, etc.).
Advantage of the latter is that it's got a very simple point-and-click GUI--add shapefile, create cartogram wizard, export shapefile, voila.
Both are based on the Gastner-Newman diffusion-based algorithm.
If you check the build page you'll see that at the moment the package fails to build. I thought it might be something minor but I've put in a little bit of work so far and it's still failing to build on my machine.
You might want to email the authors and ask them. You could also try their forum but it looks like it hasn't seen much activity lately.

R bindings for Mapnik?

I frequently find myself doing some analysis in R and then wanting to make a quick map. The standard plot() function does a reasonable job of quick, but I quickly find that I need to go to ggplot2 when I want to make something that looks nice or has more complex symbology requirements. Ggplot2 is great, but is sometimes cumbersome to convert a SpatialPolygonsDataFrame into the format required by Ggplot2. Ggplot2 can also be a tad slow when dealing with large maps that require specific projections.
It seems like I should be able to use Mapnik to plot spatial objects directly from R, but after exhausting my Google-fu, I cannot find any evidence of bindings. Rather than assume that such a thing doesn't exist, I thought I'd check here to see if anyone knows of an R - Mapnik binding.
The Mapnik FAQ explicitly mentions Python bindings -- as does the wiki -- with no mention of R, so I think you are correct that no (Mapnik-sponsored, at least) R bindings currently exist for Mapnik.
You might get a more satisfying (or at least more detailed) answer by asking on the Mapnik users list. They will know for certain if any projects exist to make R bindings for Mapnik, and if not, your interest may incite someone to investigate the possibility of generating bindings for R.
I would write the SpatialWotsitDataFrames to Shapefiles and then launch a Python Mapnik script. You could even use R to generate the Python script (package 'brew' is handy for making files from templates and inserting values form R).

How to make interactive charts together with R language

I'm helping my friend make a website. He previously used R language to generate statistical charts. Now he want to generate some dynamic chart so that when users move mouse over certain part of the chart there will be some description/complementary information pops up for them to read. What kind of technology/tools/packages I can use for this purpose?
PS: I've explored some possible ways, yet none of them fits my needs. I've tried rggobi + ggobi. They can't coz they are not for web applications. iPlot can't do it coz it generates histogram only. I've thought about asking R produces some intermediate date which I can pass to some JavaScript packages like HighCharts. Yet, apparently R is much powerful than JS. R can generates some advanced type of charts which JS just can't do.
You should use R to generate the data and then export it in a format that a javascript framework for graphs can understand.
This way you could benefit from the advanced statistical analysis provided by R and the presentation layer of javascript.
Lots of solutions exist for this problem, but i've heard lots of good things about Raphael and its chart plugin, which you may want to investigate
The playwith package offers facilities to manipulate rgl graphics. A couple of links:
http://code.google.com/p/playwith/w/list
http://www.r-bloggers.com/playing-with-the-%E2%80%98playwith%E2%80%99-package/
Look at the sendplot package or the RSVGTipsDevice package.

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