Why the doBy package?

  • The doBy package is (yet another) R package with utility functions.

  • doBy originally grew out of a need to calculate groupwise summary statistics, which explains the origin of the name:

    “do something when data is grouped By some variables”.

  • The facilities for groupwise computations in doBy were relatively popular in the years 2005-2010 or so. Today these facilities are less used because there are many (mostly better) alternatives. For example, R’ s own aggregate() function is an alternative to doBy’s summaryBy() function. Also the dplyr package provides nice altertatives to the facilities for groupwise computations in doBy.
  • However, doBy contains many other utilities.
  • Among these are facilities for computing LS-means (least squares means, also known as marginal means or population means).

    • Development versions of doBy are hosted at github

FAQ

Q: Is there a paper describing the doBy package?

A: Not for the moment.