In the life sciences, many assays measure only the relative abundances of components in each sample. Such data, called compositional data, require special treatment to avoid misleading conclusions.

The table below shows my favorite go-to R packages for data import, wrangling, visualization and analysis — plus a few miscellaneous tasks tossed in. The package names in the table are clickable if ...

Once you’ve installed and configured R to your liking, it’s time to start using it to work with data. Yes, you can type your data directly into R’s interactive console. But for any kind of serious ...