R has several ways to specify which variables to use in an analysis. Some of the most frustrating errors can result from not understanding the order in which R searches for variables. This post demonstrates that order, hopefully smoothing your … Continue reading → [Read more...]

The TIOBE Community Programming Index ranks the popularity of programming languages, but from a programming language perspective rather than as analytical software (http://www.tiobe.com). It extracts measurements from blogs, entries in Wikipedia, books on Amazon, search engine results, etc. and combines them into a single index. … Continue reading → [Read more...]

The open source R software for analytics has a reputation for being hard to learn. It certainly can be, especially for people who are already familiar with similar packages such as SAS, SPSS or Stata. Training and documentation that leverages … Continue reading → [Read more...]

The 2012 results of the annual KDnuggets poll are in. It shows R in first place with 30.7% of users reporting having used it for a real project. Excel is almost as popular. It seems out of place among so … Continue reading → [Read more...]