Packages

This page provides useful links and resources related to the many publicly available R packages that we will explore throughout the semester. (Note: This page will update periodically throughout the semester.)

	Use	Description
haven	Data imports/exports	Import foreign statistical formats into R (Stata/SPSS/SAS)
dplyr	Data wrangling	A core package for dataframe manipulation
tidyr	Data wrangling	A collection of tools for creating tidy data
ggplot2	Data visualization	Tidyverse implementation of the grammar of graphics
plotly	Data visualization	Plotly wrapper to create interactive visualizations
rvest	Data scraping	Useful for html web scraping
httr	Data collection	Easy commands to work with APIs
polite	Data scraping	Web scraping responsibly
scales	Data formatting	Formatting numeric data
lubridate	Data formatting	Working with date data
rgdal	Geospatial	For loading geospatial data (shapefiles)
sf	Geospatial	Working with geospatial data
mapproj	Geospatial	Loading map projections for visualizations
leaflet	Geospatial	Interactive mapping
forcats	Data wrangling	Working with factor functions in the tidyverse
caret	Machine learning	A workhorse package for training ML models
iml	Machine learning	Interpreting complex machine learning models
tidytext	Text-as-data	Structuring text data in tidy format
SnowballC	Text-as-data	Useful package for stemming words
topicmodels	Text-as-data	Workhorse package for estimating LDA topic models
ggwordcloud	Text-as-data	ggplot2 add-on for creating word clouds
missForest	Missing data	Using random forest for missing data imputation
Hmisc	Missing data	Extensive package which includes imputation functions
mice	Missing data	Package for estimating mice models
sqldf	SQL Interface	Useful database interfacing language (SQL)
googlesheets4	Data imports/exports	Integrating R with collaborative Google Sheets
datapasta	Data imports/exports	Copying and pasting data into and out of R
inspectDF	Data exploration	Inspecting data frames more carefully
janitor	Data cleaning	Data cleaning functions
esquisse	Data visualization	Creating graphics using a GUI
cronR	Data processing	Scheduling scripts
devtools	Data processing	Developing and installing developer packages
RSelenium	Data collection	More advanced web scraping