Parsnip

parsnip package provides a tidy and unified interface to models that can be used to try a range of models without getting bogged down in the syntactical minutiae of the underlying packages.

Modeling functions and methods across different R packages can have very different interfaces. If you would like to try different approaches, there is a lot of different syntaxes to remember and it quickly gets very confusing. For example, if you are fitting a random forest model and would like to adjust the number of trees in the forest, there are different argument names to remember:

• randomForest package, randomForest::randomForest uses ntree,
• ranger package, ranger::ranger uses num.trees,
• Spark’s sparklyr::ml_random_forest uses num_trees.

Rather than remembering these different parameters, parsnip offers a common interface, trees, and translates between the real parameters in each of the implementation:

> library(parsnip)
> rf_model <- rand_forest(trees = 2000)