R Statistics Cookbook

Using R6 classes

Object-oriented programming allows us to organize our code in classes, encapsulating similar functionality together, and also allowing us clearly to separate internal from external methods. For example, we can design a class that has a method for reading data from a file, another method for removing outliers, and another one for selecting a subset of the columns. We can decide to keep all of these methods as public, meaning that we can access them from outside the class definition.

R supports object-oriented programming via S3 and S4 classes. The R6Class package, allows us to use R6 classes. These allow us to define our own classes in R in a very easy way. They also support inheritance, meaning that we can define a parent ...