An R equivalent to Stata’s ‘replace if’

07 April 2023

Version 0.99.31.6 of package “memisc” was recently (3rd March 2023) published on CRAN. One of the new features of this version is the %if% operator which allows to assign values to subsets of observations. To see how it works, consider the following example:

I implemented this feature on suggestion from a colleague who missed such a feature for data preparation.

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RKernel: Yet another R kernel for Jupyter

04 February 2023

The package ‘RKernel’ allows you to run R in Jupyter notebooks etc. I have been working on the package on and off since summer 2021. I started because I was dissatisfied with the default rich output that the already existing IRkernel produces. Also, the help system seemed to be broken with version <= 1.3 of ‘IRkernel’ when used with a more recent version of R (>=4.3?).¹

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New Book: Data Management in R

25 November 2020

My new book “Data Management in R: A Guide for Social Scientists” is now in print and is announced by SAGE to appear on 26 December 2020, right on time for Boxing Day!

Supporting material can be found on the page “Data Management in R: A Guide for Social Scientists”.

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A “normalizing” re-alignment of voting behaviour in East Germany?

10 August 2020

I am currently working on a book chapter about “Sozialstruktur und Wahlverhalten in Ost- und Westdeutschland – Konvergenz, Divergenz oder Persistenz?” (Social Structure and Voting Behaviour in East and West Germany – Convergence, Divergence, or Persistence?). In this context I found the remarkable result shown in the following figure.

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Now available as open access article: “Multilevel Analysis with Few Clusters”

13 May 2020

Our paper on “Multilevel Analysis with Few Clusters: Improving Likelihood-based Methods” is now published as an open access article by the British Journal of Political Science (Elff, Heisig, Schaeffer, and Shikano 2021), along with a comment by Daniel Stegmueller (Stegmueller 2020) and a response by us (Elff, Heisig, Schaeffer, and Shikano 2021).

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New memisc release 0.99.20.1 improves compatibility with RStudio and “tidyverse”

22 November 2019

Release 0.99.20.1. has been published on CRAN. It improves the way the package interoperates with RStudio and “tidyverse”. In particular:

A function view() provides a generic interface to the GUI function View() in base R and RStudio. It makes it possible to extend it to data objects of the classes “data.set”, “codeplan”, “descriptions”, and “importer”.

A method for “data.set” objects allows to transfer these objects more easiliy into the “tidyverse”, i.e. facilitates the use of functions from these package ecosystem on data sets imported or created with memisc. An as_haven() function translates “data.set” objects into “tibbles” with that extra information that the “haven” package adds to “tibbles” imported with the help of that package. This should allow to view and post-process data imported with memisc more or less the same way as if the data were imported with “haven”.

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