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Data Dialogue: Simple Arrays with Davis Vaughan, R Studio

Rhodes Information Initiative
Thursday, April 18, 2019
11:45 am - 1:00 pm
Davis Vaughan, R Studio
Data Dialogue

Within the tidyverse, the core structure that powers many packages is the tibble, a modern reimagining of the data frame. Unfortunately, with the large focus on data frames, the array has been left behind. The rray package is an attempt to change that. By borrowing ideas from tibble, rray hopes to create "simpler arrays" that are more predictable to use and program around.
To accomplish this, rray provides the following new infrastructure:
1. An rray class, which never drops dimensions while subsetting, and consistently retains dimension names where possible.
2. Broadcasting semantics, using the xtensor library. rray implements the wildly popular idea of broadcasting, originally found in the Python library, numpy, to allow more intuitive and powerful operations between multiple rray objects. This opens up a much more complete set of operations than is currently possible with base R.
3. A consistent toolkit for common array manipulation tasks, such as computing sums and products along any axis. Each function retains dimensionality by default, making it easy to link operations together through broadcasting. Importantly, this toolkit works with base R arrays as well as with the new rray objects.
https://davisvaughan.github.io/rray/
https://github.com/DavisVaughan/rray

Contact: Ariel Dawn