I went down a strange path recently, trying to compile binaries of R packages for Linux. I’m not sure why — this area is pretty much covered by the RStudio Package Manager. I’ll leave my Dockerfiles here in case they’re of any use to a future wayward R programmer.

I have a simple machine learning workflow that I recreate whenever I’m testing something new. I take some interesting data and a target, throw in some pre-processing, tune hyperparameters with cross-validation, and train a random forest. It’s all the basic ingredients for a machine learning model. Since I like Julia so much, I’ll recreate my simple machine learning workflow with Julia’s MLJ package.

I have a machine learning model that takes some time to train. Data pre-processing and model fitting can take 15–20 minutes. That’s not so bad, but I also want to tune my model to make sure I’m using the best hyper-parameters. With 16 different combinations of hyperparameters and 5-fold cross-validation, my 20 minutes can become a day or more.

AWS has announced support for container images for their serverless computing platform Lambda. AWS doesn’t provide an R runtime for Lambda, and this was the excuse I needed to finally try to make one.

Locking down R package dependencies and versions is a solved problem, thanks to the easy-to-use renv package. System dependencies — those Linux packages that need to be installed to make certain R packages work — are a bit harder to manage.