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Using Python Within R

David Smith points out new reticulate package:

With reticulate, you can:

  • Import objects from Python, automatically converted into their equivalent R types. (For example, Pandas data frames become R data.frame objects, and NumPy arrays become R matrix objects.)

  • Import Python modules, and call their functions from R

  • Source Python scripts from R

  • Interactively run Python commands from the R command line

  • Combine R code and Python code (and output) in R Markdown documents, as shown in the snippet below

The first thing that came to mind when reading this was the implementation of the keras package in R and how it calls out to TensorFlow (written in Python).  The ability to make R vs Python an “and” instead of an “or” proposition is quite powerful.