Thematic Maps

Thematic maps are geographical maps in which spatial data distributions are visualized. This package offers a flexible, layer-based, and easy to use approach to create thematic maps, such as choropleths and bubble maps.

Treemap Visualization

A treemap is a space-filling visualization of hierarchical structures. This package offers great flexibility to draw treemaps.

Thematic Map Tools

Set of tools for reading and processing spatial data. The aim is to supply the workflow to create thematic maps. This package also facilitates 'tmap', the package for visualizing thematic maps.

Rendering Parameterized SQL and Translation to Dialects

A rendering tool for parameterized SQL that also translates into different SQL dialects. These dialects include 'Microsoft SQL Server', 'Oracle', 'PostgreSql', 'Amazon RedShift', 'Apache Impala', 'IBM Netezza', 'Google BigQuery', 'Microsoft PDW', 'Snowflake', 'Azure Synapse Analytics Dedicated', 'Apache Spark', 'SQLite', and 'InterSystems IRIS'.

Colors for all

Color palettes for all people, including those with color vision deficiency. Popular color palette series have been organized by type and have been scored on several properties such as color-blind-friendliness and fairness (i.e. do colors stand out equally?). Own palettes can also be loaded and analysed. Besides the common palette types (categorical, sequential, and diverging) it also includes cyclic and bivariate color palettes. Furthermore, a color for missing values is assigned to each palette.

Support for Parallel Computation, Logging, and Function Automation

Support for parallel computation with progress bar, and option to stop or proceed on errors. Also provides logging to console and disk, and the logging persists in the parallel threads. Additional functions support function call automation with delayed execution (e.g. for executing functions in parallel).

Connecting to Various Database Platforms

An R 'DataBase Interface' ('DBI') compatible interface to various database platforms ('PostgreSQL', 'Oracle', 'Microsoft SQL Server', 'Amazon Redshift', 'Microsoft Parallel Database Warehouse', 'IBM Netezza', 'Apache Impala', 'Google BigQuery', 'Snowflake', 'Spark', 'SQLite', and 'InterSystems IRIS'). Also includes support for fetching data as 'Andromeda' objects. Uses either 'Java Database Connectivity' ('JDBC') or other 'DBI' drivers to connect to databases.

Memory-Efficient Storage of Large Data on Disk and Fast Access Functions

The ff package provides data structures that are stored on disk but behave (almost) as if they were in RAM by transparently mapping only a section (pagesize) in main memory - the effective virtual memory consumption per ff object. ff supports R's standard atomic data types 'double', 'logical', 'raw' and 'integer' and non-standard atomic types boolean (1 bit), quad (2 bit unsigned), nibble (4 bit unsigned), byte (1 byte signed with NAs), ubyte (1 byte unsigned), short (2 byte signed with NAs), ushort (2 byte unsigned), single (4 byte float with NAs). For example 'quad' allows efficient storage of genomic data as an 'A','T','G','C' factor. The unsigned types support 'circular' arithmetic. There is also support for close-to-atomic types 'factor', 'ordered', 'POSIXct', 'Date' and custom close-to-atomic types. ff not only has native C-support for vectors, matrices and arrays with flexible dimorder (major column-order, major row-order and generalizations for arrays). There is also a ffdf class not unlike data.frames and import/export filters for csv files. ff objects store raw data in binary flat files in native encoding, and complement this with metadata stored in R as physical and virtual attributes. ff objects have well-defined hybrid copying semantics, which gives rise to certain performance improvements through virtualization. ff objects can be stored and reopened across R sessions. ff files can be shared by multiple ff R objects (using different data en/de-coding schemes) in the same process or from multiple R processes to exploit parallelism. A wide choice of finalizer options allows to work with 'permanent' files as well as creating/removing 'temporary' ff files completely transparent to the user. On certain OS/Filesystem combinations, creating the ff files works without notable delay thanks to using sparse file allocation. Several access optimization techniques such as Hybrid Index Preprocessing and Virtualization are implemented to achieve good performance even with large datasets, for example virtual matrix transpose without touching a single byte on disk. Further, to reduce disk I/O, 'logicals' and non-standard data types get stored native and compact on binary flat files i.e. logicals take up exactly 2 bits to represent TRUE, FALSE and NA. Beyond basic access functions, the ff package also provides compatibility functions that facilitate writing code for ff and ram objects and support for batch processing on ff objects (e.g. as.ram, as.ff, ffapply). ff interfaces closely with functionality from package 'bit': chunked looping, fast bit operations and coercions between different objects that can store subscript information ('bit', 'bitwhich', ff 'boolean', ri range index, hi hybrid index). This allows to work interactively with selections of large datasets and quickly modify selection criteria. Further high-performance enhancements can be made available upon request.

Extension to 'tmap' for Creating Cartograms

Provides new layer functions to 'tmap' for creating various types of cartograms. A cartogram is a type of thematic map in which geographic areas are resized or distorted based on a quantitative variable, such as population. The goal is to make the area sizes proportional to the selected variable while preserving geographic positions as much as possible.

Asynchronous Disk-Based Representation of Massive Data

Storing very large data objects on a local drive, while still making it possible to manipulate the data in an efficient manner.