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Duplicate thread: I just installed the latest version of R. What packages should I obtain?

What are the R packages you couldn't imagine your daily work with data? Please list both general and specific tools.

UPDATE: As for 24.10.10 ggplot2 seems to be the winer with 7 votes.

Other packages mentioned more than one are:

  • plyr - 4
  • RODBC, RMySQL - 4
  • sqldf - 3
  • lattice - 2
  • zoo - 2
  • Hmisc/rms - 2
  • Rcurl - 2
  • XML - 2

Thanks all for your answers!

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    $\begingroup$ Very subjective question: this question cannot be answered, and is not suitable for a QA site. $\endgroup$
    – Egon Willighagen
    Commented Jul 19, 2010 at 19:58
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    $\begingroup$ Should probably be community wiki; useful question here but doesn't have definitive answer. $\endgroup$
    – Shane
    Commented Jul 19, 2010 at 20:05
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    $\begingroup$ @Shane: good point. moved. @ Egon: subjective indeed. but if the answers come from knowledgeable people i don't mind dose of subjectivity. i've started learning R quite recently and have couple of dozens installed to explore, however i notice that there are tools that I use much more often irrespectively of the task at hand. $\endgroup$
    – user22
    Commented Jul 19, 2010 at 20:06
  • $\begingroup$ It would be interesting if StackExchange could support some method of linking community wiki posts across sites. Because I will bet this question has been asked on Stackoverflow and I also think that Statistical Analysis may attract some people that wouldn't usually visit SO. $\endgroup$
    – Sharpie
    Commented Jul 19, 2010 at 20:19
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    $\begingroup$ I disagree that it's for SO, especially considering the discussions on meta that supporting tools for statistical analysis (including software) is on-topic.... $\endgroup$
    – Thomas Owens
    Commented Aug 14, 2010 at 12:25

37 Answers 37

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I like roxygen for its Curry() function.

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RColorBrewer has not been mentioned here, I use it often for plotting if I need color schemes

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Jeromy mentioned my first pick: Lattice.

I also have found the doBy package and its summaryBy function to be insanely useful. They extend aggregate with a formula syntax that lets you aggregate multiple functions simultaneously in non-trivial ways. Great if you want, say, mean, std. dev., and length.

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I am a big fan of RCPP when I need a rapid for loop or to perform non very R compliant treatments. It is very well implemented in the R eco system, can receive Matrix / sparse Matrix without conversion as arguments in a function.

C++ syntax is easy when you are doing simple stuff (which is often my case).

Really, you don't need to be a package maker to need this awesome lib.

Did I say C++ is very rapid?

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The doParallel and foreach packages have made my life so much easier by allowing me to parallelize my code and run it on a compute-optimized instance on Amazon EC2! I use them very often. But that would not have been possible without the RStudio AMIs released by Louis Aslett. Finally, I have to mention the stringr package which really makes working with strings a walk in the park. Use it in every text mining application. And I also use knitr very frequently to produce high quality reports of my work. Many thanks for this amazing package Yihui Xie!

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Some packages are very useful in R.

I will just recommand kernlab for Kernel-based Machine Learning Lab and e1071 for SVM and ggplot2 for graphics

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I use ggplot2, reshape, lattice, knitr more often.

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