The State of Data on CRAN

Discovering Good Data Packages

Motivation

R packages that serve datasets come in several flavors. This post explores several aspects of these packages and their included datasets in order to:

• Survey existing R datasets

• Summarize best practices

Our primary objective is to increase dataset discoverability especially to increase the diversity of datasets used in R tutorials.

Stats

Package Stats

• The number of packages on CRAN that include data

• Does the DESCRIPTION contain LazyData: true?

• How many authors are on packages that include data?

Dataset Stats

• How big is each dataset?

• What topic are the datasets related to?

• How are datasets licensed?

Discussion

We did not look at datasets provided as raw files or on Bioconductor.

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