by Andrie de Vries In 2014 we introduced the checkpoint package for reproducible research. This package makes it easy to use R package versions that existed on CRAN at a given date in the past, and to use varying package versions with different projects. Previous blog posts include: Introducing the Reproducible ... [Read more...]

by Alan Weaver, Advanced Analytics Specialist at Microsoft Very often data scientists and analysts require access to back-end resources on Azure. For example, they may need to start a virtual machine or resize a Hadoop cluster. This typically requires making a request to the IT department and patiently waiting. AzureSMR ... [Read more...]

by Andrie de Vries One of the most exciting features of the forthcoming release of SQL Server 2016 (generally available on June 1, and in preview now) is the ability to run R scripts directly in database using SQL Server R Services. This means your R code will run directly on the ... [Read more...]

by Andrie de Vries A few weeks ago I wrote about the growth of CRAN packages, where I demonstrated how to scrape CRAN archives to get an estimate of the number of packages over time. In this post I briefly mentioned that the Ecdat package contains a dataset, CRANpackages, with ... [Read more...]

by Andrie de Vries Every once in a while somebody asks me how many packages are on CRAN. (More than 8,000 in April, 2016). A year ago, in April 2015, there were ~6,200 packages on CRAN. This poses a second question: what is the historical growth of CRAN packages? One source of information is ... [Read more...]

by Andrie de Vries Earlier today Microsoft announced that Jupyter Notebooks are now available with the R Kernel as a service in Azure Machine Learning (ML) Studio. I wrote about Jupyter Notebooks in September 2015 (Using R with Jupyter Notebooks), where I noted some of the great benefits of using notebooks: ... [Read more...]

by Andrie de Vries A week ago my high school friend, @XLRunner, sent me a link to the article "How Zach Bitter Ran 100 Miles in Less Than 12 Hours". Zach's effort was rewarded with the American record for the 100 mile event. Zach Bitter holds the American record for the 100 mile This ... [Read more...]

by Andrie de Vries Have you noticed that most R help does not contain any images? Historically, this was for a good reason: most programming language help assumes that you use the system on a text-only system, e.g. a headless linux server. If your system has no graphical capabilities, ... [Read more...]

by Andrie de Vries Last month I wrote about How to store and use webservice keys and authentication details, a summary of the options mentioned in a twitter discussion started by Jennifer Bryan. All of the options in my article really stored the secrets in plain text somewhere on your ... [Read more...]

by Andrie de Vries I am preparing for a demonstration of functionality of R at a conference next week. For maximum impact, I wanted to use a fast virtual machine in Azure. It is actually very easy to build a fresh machine (cloud or otherwise) that contains R as well ... [Read more...]

by Andrie de Vries (@RevoAndrie) I frequently get asked the question how you can safely store login details and passwords for use by R, without exposing these details in your script. Yesterday Jennifer Bryan asked this question on twitter and a small storm of views and tweets erupted. Do we ... [Read more...]

by Andrie de Vries We have written on several occasions about AzureML, the Microsoft machine learning studio that is part of the Cortana Analytics suite: Running R in the Azure ML cloud Call R functions from any application with the AzureML package Using miniCRAN in Azure ML In September we ... [Read more...]

by Andrie de Vries For much of my data science work, I want to have the very latest package from CRAN or github. However, once any work finds it way into production server (where it runs on a regular schedule), I want my environment to be stable. Most importantly, for ... [Read more...]

by Andrie de Vries Back in 2011, I asked a question on StackOverflow: "How to make a great R reproducible example?". This question attracted some great answers, including answers by Hadley Wickham and Joris Meys (co-author of R for Dummies). In June of this year Tyler Rinker added a new answer. ... [Read more...]

by Andrie de Vries Recently we had a question on the public mailing list for Revolution R Open (RRO), on the topic of "MKL multithreaded library and mclapply do not play well together". If you're not familiar with these topics, here is a quick primer: The Intel MKL is a ... [Read more...]

By Andrie de Vries Earlier this month Rich Calaway, programme manager at Microsoft and maintainer of the foreach package, published some updates to the foreach suite of packages, including: foreach iterators doMC doParallel doSNOW Most of the changes were cosmetic, or to conform to CRAN policy. However, the last two ... [Read more...]

by Andrie de Vries The second week of SQLRelay (#SQLRelay) kicked off in London earlier this week. SQLRelay is a series of conferences, spanning 10 cities in the United Kingdom over two weeks. The London agenda included 4 different streams, with tracks for the DBA, BI and Analytics users, as well as ... [Read more...]

by Andrie de Vries In one of John D. Cooke's blog posts of 2010 (Parameters and Percentiles), he poses the following problem: The doctor says 10% of patients respond within 30 days of treatment and 80% respond within 90 days of treatment. Now go turn that into a probability distribution. That’s a common task ... [Read more...]

by Jens Carl Streibig, Professor Emeritus at University of Copenhagen Editor's introduction: for background on the miniCRAN package, see our previous blog posts: Introducing miniCRAN Using R in Myanmar MiniCRAN saves my neck when out in regions where seamless running internet is and exception rather than the rule. R is ... [Read more...]

by Andrie de Vries Every once in a while I try to remember how to do interpolation using R. This is not something I do frequently in my workflow, so I do the usual sequence of finding the appropriate help page: ?interpolate Help pages: stats::approx Interpolation Functions stats::NLSstClosestX ... [Read more...]