Posted by David Smith

Machine Learning in R with TensorFlow

Modern machine learning platforms like Tensorflow have to date been used mainly by the computer science crowd, for applications like computer vision and language understanding. But as JJ Allaire pointed out in his keynote at the RStudio conference earlier this month (embedded below), there's … Continue reading →

A fresh look for base graphics

While ggplot2 (and its various extensions) is often the go-to package for graphics in R these days, if you need to step outside the boundaries of what ggplot2 can do, you can always step back to base R graphics (and the built-in lattice package) and customize to your hearts content. The problem … Continue reading →

What does Microsoft do with R?

I was genuinely chuffed to get a shout-out in the most recent episode of Not So Standard Deviations, the awesome statistics-and-R themed podcast hosted by Hilary Parker and Roger Peng. In that episode, Roger recounts his recent discovery of the Microsoft ecosystem of tools for R, which he … Continue reading →

Diversity scholarships for upcoming R conferences

One of the greatest things about the R community is its diversity. This is largely thanks to organizations like Forwards and R-Ladies, who have been instrumental in welcoming women and other under-represented groups to the world of R. Likewise, conferences in the R community encourage diversity, … Continue reading →

In case you missed it: January 2018 roundup

In case you missed them, here are some articles from January of particular interest to R users. Josh Katz and Peter Aldhous used R to analyze the content and presentation of the most recent State of the Union speech from the US president. Slides for my presentation "Speeding up R with … Continue reading →

The AI Show: Data Science Virtual Machine

The Data Science Virtual Machine was featured on a recent episode of the AI Show with Seth Juarez and Gopi Kumar. If you want a quick and easy way to spin up a virtual machine with all of the data science tools you'll ever need — including R and RStudio — already installed and ready to … Continue reading →

Analysis of Trump’s State of the Union Speech, with R

President Trump's State of the Union speech was last night, and it seemed to me it dragged on a bit. That's because it was apparently the slowest SOTU speech in history, based on average number of words spoken per minute. The chart below, based on these data, was created by Josh Katz. … Continue reading →

Speed up R with Parallel Programming in the Cloud

This past weekend I attended the R User Day at Data Day Texas in Austin. It was a great event, mainly because so many awesome people from the R community came to give some really interesting talks. Lucy D’Agostino McGowan has kindly provided a list of the talks and links to slides, and I … Continue reading →

Speed up simulations in R with doAzureParallel

I'm a big fan using R to simulate data. When I'm trying to understand a data set, my first step is sometimes to simulate data from a model and compare the results to the data, before I go down the path of fitting an analytical model directly. Simulations are easy to code in R, but they can … Continue reading →

Applications now open for R Consortium funding for R user groups and small conferences

If you're an organizer of an R-focused meetup group, or are planning a community-led R conference, the 2018 R Consortium R User Group Support Program is now accepting applications for sponsorship. The 2017 program funded 76 user groups and 3 small conferences, and the program is expanding … Continue reading →

Scraping a website with 5 lines of R code

In what is rapidly becoming a series — cool things you can do with R in a tweet — Julia Silge demonstrates scraping the list of members of the US house of representatives on Wikipedia in just 5 R statements: library(rvest)library(tidyverse)h <- … Continue reading →

Visualize your Strava routes with R

Strava is a fitness app that records you activities, including the routes of your walks, rides and runs. The service also provides an API that allows you to extract all of your data for analysis. University of Melbourne research fellow Marcus Volz created an R package to download and visualize … Continue reading →

Registration and talk proposals now open for useR!2018

Registration is now open for useR! 2018, the official R user conference to be held in Brisbane, Australia July 10-13. If you haven't been to a useR! conference before, it's a fantastic opportunity to meet and mingle with other R users from around the world, see talks on R packages and … Continue reading →

Microsoft R Open 3.4.3 now available

Microsoft R Open (MRO), Microsoft's enhanced distribution of open source R, has been upgraded to version 3.4.3 and is now available for download for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This update upgrades the R language engine to the latest R (version 3.4.3) and updates the bundled … Continue reading →

A simple way to set up a SparklyR cluster on Azure

The SparklyR package from RStudio provides a high-level interface to Spark from R. This means you can create R objects that point to data frames stored in the Spark cluster and apply some familiar R paradigms (like dplyr) to the data, all the while leveraging Spark's distributed architecture … Continue reading →