In case you missed it: May 2016 roundup

In case you missed them, here are some articles from May of particular interest to R users. 

A 3-part tutorial on principal components regression in R: part 1, part 2, and part 3.

Implications of the fact that in R, names have objects (and not vice-versa).

Highlights of the R/Finance 2016 conference, according to Joseph Rickert.

A template for predicting maintenance events for aircraft engines, using R.

The "feather" package for fast data exchange between Python and R, now on CRAN.

Microsoft R Open 3.2.5 now available.

There are now R user groups in 223 cities and 55 countries.

A preview of Spark 2.0 and the updated SparkR package.

All the documentation for Microsoft R Server is now available to everyone, online.

The most popular (and controversial) ingredients in pasta carbonara, visualized with R.

Joseph Rickert's guidelines for identifying the best R packages.

"Effective Graphs with Microsoft R Open", a free e-book, is available for download.

Estimating demand for bike rentals in Washington, DC with R.

R Tools for Visual Studio 0.3, an IDE for the R language, is now available.

A brief summary of the changes and new features in R 3.3.0.

A tutorial on installing R packages on a firewalled SQL Server instance.

How to train gradient-boosted trees with Microsoft R Server.

Reproducing results in Efron's 1987 paper "Logistic Regression, Survival Analysis, and the Kaplan-Meier Curve" using R.

General interest stories (not related to R) in the past month included stories about: : the history of Japan, a magnet machine, an audio-visual history of the Billboard Top 5, and roads to Romes.

As always, thanks for the comments and please send any suggestions to me at davidsmi@microsoft.com. Don't forget you can follow the blog using an RSS reader, via email using blogtrottr, or by following me on Twitter (I'm @revodavid). You can find roundups of previous months here.