R tops 2015 KDnuggets Software Poll

R is the leading choice for Predictive Analytics / Data Mining / Data Science software according to the results of the 2015 KDnuggets Software Poll, now in its 16th year. Each of the 28,000 participants selected one or more tools they had used in the last year from a list of 93 options, and R was selected by 46.9% of participants (up from 38.5% in 2015). The top 10 most-selected tools are listed in the table below:

R reclaims its top ranking from Rapidminer, which placed second in this year's poll. (While many vendors and evangelists (yours truly included) encouraged  users to vote in the poll, pollster Gregory Piatetsky reports that he "not found any bot or illegal voting, and did not have to remove any votes".) A notable entrant to the top 10 this year is Spark, which is showing great traction for in-Hadoop analytics. The top 3 newcomers in the poll for 2015 were: the scikit-learn suite for Python; Azure ML and Power BI.

One other notable result from the poll is that 73% of respondents are using at least one open-source tool in their work, and 9% use solely open-source tools.

For the full results of the poll and sub-analyses of the different tool categories, follow the link below.

KDnuggets: 16th annual KDnuggets Software Poll