Monthly Summary of Selected Trends, Activities and Insights for R – August 2018

Data for the trends and activities summarized here were obtained from popular websites used by the R community such as Google, GitHub, StackOverflow, Rstudio, METACRAN and R-Bloggers

1. StackOverflow

Number of StackOverflow Questions tagged R: 4,565 (8%  down from July)

Number of Answers for R questions: 4,630 (3%  up from July)

Number of Comments for R questions: 9,018 (6% down from July)

Page Views for R questions: 172,295 (7% up from July)

Source: https://data.stackexchange.com

The pie chart below shows the distribution of the questions, answers, and comments for R at StackOverflow

Figure 1

2. R/Packages Downloads

The data for this section is obtained through the API of METACRAN’s  service that could be found here:

METACRAN obtains the download summaries from the RStudio  CRAN mirror taken from http://cran-logs.rstudio.com/ This is one very popular download mirror for the R language due to the popularity of the RStudio IDE for R.

Base R downloads:  61,715 (10% up from July)

The chart in Figure 2 shows the distribution of base R downloads among the computer operating systems from which R was downloaded.

Figure 2

The chart in Figure 3 shows the number of downloads by R versions. From the chart, it is clear that there are users of R that still make use of older R versions e.g. version 2.x.x series.

Figure 3

R Packages Downloads:  41,935,159 (1%  down from July)

Package downloads have dropped steadily for two months in our series now.

Figure 4 is a chart that shows the daily download variation of R packages in August.

Figure 4

Ratio of Base R downloads to R Package downloads: 1 : 679

Thus, for each download of base R, there are over 679 extension packages downloaded. The use of R still depends largely on extension packages.

Figure 5 is a chart visualizing the ratio of Base R downloads to R packages downloads

Figure 5

Top Packages (August, 2018):

Sum of Downloads for Top 50 packages: 15, 804, 449  (3% up from July)

Download contribution of Top 50 packages amongst other 12,000+ CRAN packages: 37.7%

(i.e, over 37% of total R package downloads came from Top 50 packages in July)

Figure 6

Below is a chart in Figure 7 showing the top 50 downloaded packages based on their download counts.

Figure 7

Sum of Downloads for Top 100 packages:  23, 556, 539  (2% up from July)

Download contribution of Top 100 amongst other 12,000+ CRAN packages:  56.2%

(i.e, over 56% of R package downloads came from Top 100)

Figure 8

Top 10 Packages and their Primary Maintainers:

Hadley Wickham and Dirk Eddelbuetel respectively dominate the top 10 by both number of packages and downloads from the list above. Important to note that stringi, stringr, glue, and fansi are packages for string-related tasks.

3. GitHub

The Top 10 R repositories that appeared on GitHub’s trends in August are:

1. ProgrammingAssignment2  by Roger D. Peng
2. r4ds by Hadley Wickham
3. gganimate  by Thomas Lin Pedersen
4. tidy-animated-verbs  by Garrick Aden-Buie
5. rayshader by tylermorganwall
6. analytics  by Dhiraj Upadhyaya
7. dataviz by Claus Wilke
8. ggplot2  by Hadley Wickham
9. dplyr by Hadley Wickham
10. rvg by David Gohel

The chart of Figure 9 shows the number of stars for gotten in August for  top 10 projects that did trend in August based on data from https://github.com/trending/r?since=monthly on September 1, 2018

Figure 9

4. R Meetings/Events

The Rstudio Community website provides a weekly list of R user-group meetings and conference events curated from meetup.com and elsewhere. The data found on this website is the basis for the following analysis.

There were 74  events in about 22 countries (2.7% down in events from July)

34 events out of 74 (46% of events) were held in the United States of America

A world map showing the distribution of R events across 22 countries can be found in Figure 10a

Figure 10a

Figure 10b shows the event distribution across the 22 countries in a pie (area) chart.

Figure 10b

A weekly summary of events compared with countries for the month is shown in the bar chart of Figure 11.

Figure 11

R-Ladies

R-Ladies have a strong grip of the share of events in the R community.  33 events out of 74 (44.5% of events) were R-Ladies events

5. R Bloggers

Rbloggers.com is the most popular news aggregation website for blog posts related to the R language. There were about 203 blog posts at Rbloggers.com in July. An average of about 7 posts / day. (2.7% down from July)

6. Google Trends

The chart below shows Google Trends for the R language in August with search trends dipping only during the weekends.

Figure 12

Based on Interest by region, the Top 5 countries in August with higthe hest search activity on Google are:

1. Philippines
2. China
3. South Korea
4. St. Helena
5. Singapore

Source: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2018-08-01%202018-08-31&q=%2Fm%2F0212jm

7. R Language Ranking:

TIOBE Index: 18th   in August, 2018

Redmonk: 14th in June, 2018

8. R Consortium

Call for proposals were announced in August and will be due on September 30, 2018.

Some impact of R Consortium’s user-base expansion program through the R User Group Support (RUGS) program and R-Ladies project can be seen from the number of events in August.

44.5% of R user-group events in August were R-Ladies events. African user group meetings are gradually showing signs of consistence.

9. Google Summer of Code

The final phase of evaluations for the Google Summer of Code program for participating students and mentors took place in August. There are 27 funded projects in this program this year. See full list of R-Google Summer of Code projects 2008 – date here: http://r-central.com/gsoc.

Biography

R Central is a developing aggregation website for news, trends and activities around the R language. It provides a dashboard  which is suitable as a browser homepage that lists posts from popular sources like CRAN, R-devel, Twitter, Rbloggers, Crantastic, RWeekly, Microsoft, RConsortium, StackOverflow and several others.

Reference Links

Web: https://r-central.com

Twitter: @rcentrrall