About me

👋 I am a statistician interested in the application of statistical methods to address specific policy relevant questions, and in particular in international trade, migration, investments and theoretically founded empirical work. My interests cover methodology and data compilation practices, systematically missing data, how we clean, prepare, and tidy data in a reproducible way, and the role of information on the implications of models.

To contact me, send me an email to mavargas11 📫 uc.cl. I can provide my CV (academic/profesional) upon request.

Quick Links

• 🐦 Twitter, where I tweet about 95% about R and 5% about linear algebra and other topics.
• 📖 R4DS in Spanish, a book that I helped to translate.

Certifications

• Data Science, Johns Hopkins University.
• Tidyverse Instructor, RStudio.
• Shiny Instructor, RStudio.
• Software Carpentry, The Carpentries.

Selected publications

• Quiroga, R., Sandoval, G. & Vargas, M. (2021). R para Ciencia de Datos: Soluciones de los ejercicios (R for Data Science Solutions Manual). Self-published. URL: r4ds-soluciones.netlify.app.
• Vargas, M. (2021). Solutions Manual for An Advanced Guide to Trade Policy Analysis (R version). Bangkok: United Nations ESCAP. URL: r.tiid.org/R_structural_gravity.
• Wickham, H., & Grolemund, G. (2019). R Para Ciencia de Datos (community translation of R for Data Science). Self-Published (original version from O’Reilly). URL: es.r4ds.hadley.nz.
• Burchell, J., & Vargas, M. (2019). The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Plotnine. Leanpub. URL: leanpub.com/plotnine-guide.
• Woelwer, el al. (2018). Gravity: Estimation Methods for Gravity Models in R. Journal of Open Source Software, 3(31), 1038. URL: doi.org/10.21105/joss.01038.
• Burchell, J., & Vargas, M. (2019). The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Ggplot2. Leanpub. URL: leanpub.com/ggplot-guide.

Selected R packages

• Woelwer, A.-L., et al. (2021). Gravity: Estimation methods for gravity models. URL: CRAN.R-project.org/package=gravity.
• Palma, W., el al. (2021). LSTS: Locally stationary time series. URL: CRAN.R-project.org/package=LSTS.
• Vargas, M. (2021). Tradepolicy: Replication of an advanced guide to trade policy analysis. URL: CRAN.R-project.org/package=tradepolicy.
• Vargas, M. (2021). Tradestatistics: Open trade statistics API wrapper and utility program. URL: docs.ropensci.org/tradestatistics.
• Kunst, J., et al (2020). Highcharter: A wrapper for the highcharts library. URL: CRAN.R-project.org/package=highcharter.
• Iannone, R. & Vargas, M. (2021). Pointblank: Data validation and organization of metadata for local and remote tables. URL: CRAN.R-project.org/package=pointblank.
• Chamberlain, S., et al. (2021). Analogsea: Interface to Digital Ocean. URL: CRAN.R-project.org/package=analogsea.

CRAN

I maintain the WebTechnologies view and the official mirror for Chile.

LaTeX

I created the R package varsityblues, which allow you to write your own reports including R code and handles LaTeX setup automatically. This package is based on the LaTeX style files that that late professor Kim C. Border once sent to me.

Cloud computing

I created images for RStudio Server and RStudio Server + Kubernetes, which allow you to create virtual machines on DigitalOcean and to skip the setup time to install the Tidyverse and other packages. With these images, it takes around 30 seconds to have a ready to go setup for Data Science. This combines well with analogsea as I explain in my blog.

Datasets

Check SQL Databases for students and educators if you need access to PostgreSQL, MySQL and SQL Server databases (in strict descending order of preference!).

I also maintain Open Trade Statistics, a project created with the intention to lower the barrier to working with international economic trade data. It includes a public API, a dashboard, and an R package for data retrieval.

📈 Stats