The R-packages network: Structure, temporal evolution and assistance for users

SALGADO CORRADO ARIEL OLAF; FARALLANDRES; INÉS CARIDI

Buenos Aires

Conferencia; 27th International Conference on Statistical Physics; 2019

R is a free, open source and multi-platform programming language. It is a project sustained by a team of people from different places and disciplines. Nowadays, there are more than 12000 R-packages in official repositories. In such a way, R is an example of an empirical collaborative network that hasgrown a lot in a few years [1]. Package’s information is available in an open database, the CRAN website [2], which contains information on the date of the publication, their relationships with other packages and data about previous versions. We study the relationships between R-packages through three of their CRAN-stated relationships: Depends, Imports and Suggests (corresponding to different levels of necessity). Considering the packages as nodes, a directed network for each relationship was built (a little part in fig. A1). We observe the evolution of these networks from 1999 until 2017.