What’s New in R: March 30, 2026
Welcome to this week’s edition of What’s New in R! This week, we’re featuring a guide to detecting outliers in R, a tutorial on visualizing Chilean census data as maps, and a walkthrough of generating dynamic alt text for Shiny app plots. Let’s dive in!
Outliers in Data Analysis: Detecting Extreme Values Before Modeling in R with İstanbul Airbnb Data
M. Fatih Tüzen takes a comprehensive look at how to detect and handle outliers in R, using Istanbul Airbnb listings as a real-world example. The post covers both visual methods—histograms and boxplots—and statistical approaches like the IQR rule and Z-scores, applied within subgroups to account for context. A key insight is that what looks like an outlier globally may be perfectly normal within a specific category, such as a room type. Rather than automatically removing extreme values, Tüzen encourages understanding why they exist and considering alternatives like log transformation or robust estimation.
Visualize 2024 Census Data in Maps at the Block Level with R
Bastián Olea shares a walkthrough (in Spanish) of how to work with Chile’s 2024 census data and turn it into detailed maps at the city-block level using R. It’s a great example of going from raw government data to polished geographic visualizations, demonstrating just how much is possible with R’s spatial tools. Even if you don’t read Spanish, the code and maps speak for themselves and translation tools make it easy to follow along.
Using {ellmer} for Dynamic Alt Text Generation in {shiny} Apps
Alt text for data visualizations is important for accessibility, but writing it manually for every chart in a Shiny app is time-consuming—especially when plots update dynamically. In this post, Osheen MacOscar demonstrates how to use the {ellmer} package to connect to a large language model and automatically generate descriptive alt text for plots in real time. The approach includes error handling so the app degrades gracefully if the API call fails, and the post also recommends caching unchanged plots and being transparent with users when alt text is AI-generated.
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