crandep (Q106445)

The dependencies of CRAN packages can be analysed in a network fashion. For each package we can obtain the packages that it depends, imports, suggests, etc. By iterating this procedure over a number of packages, we can build, visualise, and analyse the dependency network, enabling us to have a bird's-eye view of the CRAN ecosystem. One aspect of interest is the number of reverse dependencies of the packages, or equivalently the in-degree distribution of the dependency network. This can be fitted by the power law and/or an extreme value mixture distribution <arXiv:2008.03073>, of which functions are provided.