What’s New in R: September 8, 2025
Welcome to this week’s edition of What’s New in R! This week, we’re featuring a package for creating messy teaching datasets, a tool for integrating SAS with R, and an AI assistant for exploratory data analysis. Let’s dive in!
Creating Messy Datasets for Teaching Purposes with {truffle}
The {truffle} package, developed by Ian Hussey, addresses a common challenge for R instructors: creating realistic messy datasets for teaching. This package generates realistic datasets with predetermined effects and various data quality issues that students commonly encounter in real-world scenarios. It’s particularly valuable for educators who want to provide hands-on experience with data cleaning without spending time manually creating flawed datasets.
{sasquatch}
The {sasquatch} package, created by Ryan Zomorrodi and now part of rOpenSci, enables seamless integration between SAS, R, and Quarto in reproducible multilingual documents. This tool is particularly valuable for teams where some members use SAS while others prefer R, allowing for true collaboration without requiring anyone to abandon their preferred statistical software. The package facilitates working with both languages within the same analytical workflow.
Introducing Databot: An AI assistant for exploratory data analysis
Posit has announced Databot, an experimental AI assistant designed specifically for exploratory data analysis (EDA) within the Positron IDE. This ambitious tool aims to automate and streamline the EDA process, helping users quickly understand their data through AI-powered analysis and visualization suggestions. While still in development, Databot represents one of Posit’s most direct application of AI technology to enhance the data analysis workflow.
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Got any ideas for resources I should feature in future issues of What’s New in R? Leave a comment below!
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