Microsoft has been making daily copies of the entire CRAN website of R packages since 2014. This archive, named MRAN, allows installing older versions of packages, which is valuable for reproducibility purposes. The 15,000+ R packages on CRAN are incessantly updated. For example, the package tidyverse depends on 109 packages; these packages accumulate 63 updates, just…
Category: Reproducibility
[100] Groundhog 2.0: Further addressing the threat R poses to reproducible research
About a year ago I wrote Colada[95], a post on the threat R poses to reproducible research. The core issue is the 'packages'. When using R, you can run library(some_package) and R can all of a sudden scrape a website, cluster standard errors, maybe even help you levitate. The problem is that packages get updated…