rfriend

Overview

rfriend is an R package designed to streamline data analysis and statistical testing by wrapping complex or repetitive code into convenient, user-friendly functions prefixed with f_ (f_riendly). Its primary focus is data exploration, statistical tests, and creating publication-ready output in multiple formats including PDF, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft Excel.

The package helps you write shorter code while producing well-formatted summaries, visualizations, and statistical tests, automatically handling data transformations, assumption checking, and post hoc testing.

Full documentation is available at https://delde001.github.io/rfriend/.

Features

Data exploration

• Summary tables: f_summary() generates comprehensive summary tables (with optional skewness, kurtosis, and confidence intervals).
• Diagnostic dashboards: f_scan() builds a density / boxplot / QQ panel for one or more variables, optionally split by grouping factors.
• Correlation plots: f_corplot() shows Pearson, Spearman, and Kendall coefficients together, with support for ordinal variables.
• Outlier handling: f_outliers() flags outliers using Tukey’s fences and f_remove_outliers() removes them with safe anti-join semantics.
• Test recommendation (beta): f_stat_wizard() inspects your data from a formula and suggests an appropriate test as ready-to-run code.

Data transformations

• f_boxcox() for Box-Cox transformations (wrapping MASS/boxcox and rcompanion).
• f_bestNormalize() wraps and extends normalization from the bestNormalize package.

Visualizations

• Boxplots (f_boxplot()), including numeric-vector input and custom palettes
• QQ-plots (f_qqnorm())
• Histograms (f_hist())

Statistical tests

Run and visualize tests on multiple response variables and predictors, with automatic assumption checking and post hoc analysis:

• ANOVA: f_aov()
• Linear regression (OLS): f_lm()
• Linear mixed-effects models: f_lmer()
• Kruskal-Wallis: f_kruskal_test()
• Friedman rank sum test: f_friedman()
• t-test: f_t_test()
• Wilcoxon test: f_wilcox_test()
• Generalized linear models: f_glm()
• Chi-square tests: f_chisq_test()

Post hoc results are summarized in a compact letter display (cld) table for easy interpretation.

Model comparison

• Compare models easily with f_model_compare().

Utilities

• f_clear() clears the workspace and restarts R.
• f_setwd() sets the working directory to the current script’s location.
• f_theme() switches RStudio themes quickly.
• f_factors() converts multiple data frame columns to factors (with optional reference-level control).
• f_long() reshapes wide data to long format in a single call.
• f_example_data() lists and returns the bundled example datasets.
• f_open_file(), f_pander(), f_rename_columns(), f_rename_vector(), f_load_packages(), and more.

Installation

rfriend requires R (>= 4.4.0) and several dependencies (see DESCRIPTION for details). PDF and Word output require Pandoc (>= 3.2), which is bundled with RStudio.

Install the latest released version from CRAN with:

install.packages("rfriend")

To install the latest development version from GitHub:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("delde001/rfriend")

Basic Usage

library(rfriend)

# Summary of your dataset
f_summary(your_dataframe)

# Run ANOVA on multiple response variables
f_aov(response_var1 + response_var2 ~ predictor1 * predictor2,
      data = your_dataframe)

# Create a boxplot of one or more variables
data(mtcars)
f_boxplot(hp + disp ~ gear * cyl,
          data = mtcars,
          intro_text = FALSE,
          output_type = "word")

# Fit a linear mixed-effects model
f_lmer(response ~ treatment + (1 | block), data = your_dataframe)

# Perform a Box-Cox transformation
transformed <- f_boxcox(your_dataframe$variable)

# Load a bundled example dataset
f_example_data()                       # list available files
path <- f_example_data("field_trial.csv")

# Clear the workspace and restart R
f_clear()

For detailed usage and examples, please refer to the package vignettes, the help files, and the documentation website at https://delde001.github.io/rfriend/.

Known Issues

• When loading rfriend, you may see harmless warnings about S3 method overwrites related to nobs.fitdistr and nobs.multinom due to imported packages (MuMIn, rstatix). These do not affect functionality.

Contributing

Contributions, bug reports, and feature requests are very welcome. Please open an issue or submit a pull request on GitHub.

Before contributing, please ensure that:

• You have tested your changes locally.
• Code is properly documented using roxygen2.
• You follow the existing style and conventions.

License

This package is licensed under GPL-3.

Contact

Author and maintainer: Sander H. van Delden Email: plantmind@proton.me

Feel free to reach out for support, feature requests, or collaborations.

Thank you for using rfriend!