MRAN, the Microsoft R Application Network has been migrated to a new high-performance, high-availability server, and we've taken the opportunity to make a few upgrades along the way. You shouldn't notice any breaking changes (of course if you do, please let us know), but you should notice faster performance for ... [Read more...]

There are many R packages that connect to the internet, whether it's to import data (readr), install packages from Github (devtools), connect with cloud services (AzureML), or many other web-connected tasks. There's one R package in particular that provides the underlying connection between R and the Web: curl, by Jeroen ... [Read more...]

Modern slot machines (fruit machine, pokies, or whatever those electronic gambling devices are called in your part of the world) are designed to be addictive. They're also usually quite complicated, with a bunch of features that affect the payout of a spin: multiple symbols with different pay scales, wildcards, scatter ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from October of particular interest to R users. A recent survey of competitors on the Kaggle platform reveals that Python (76%) and R (59%) are the preferred tools for building predictive models. Microsoft's "Team Data Science Process" has been updated with new guidelines ... [Read more...]

While spreadsheets are fine tools for collecting and sharing data, the temptation is often there to also use them for in-depth analysis better suited to reproducible systems like R. Historian Jesse Sadler recently published the useful guide Excel vs R: A Brief Introduction to R, which provides useful advice to ... [Read more...]

The RStudio team has created another very useful cheat sheet for R: Working with Strings. This cheat sheet provides an example-laden menu of operations you can perform on strings (character verctors) in R using the stringr package. While base R provides a solid set of string manipulation functions, the stringr ... [Read more...]

According to a recent analysis of Stack Overflow "Developer Stories", where programmer candidates list the technologies the would and would not like to work with, R is the least disliked programming language: This is probably related to the fact that there's high demand in the job market for fast-growing technologies, ... [Read more...]

Competitive predictive modeling site Kaggle conducted a survey of participants in prediction competitions, and the 16,000 responses provide some insights about that user community. (Whether those trends generalize to the wider community of all data scientists is unclear, however.) One question of interest asked what tools Kagglers use at work. Python ... [Read more...]

It's been over a year since we first introduced introduced the Team Data Science Process (TDSP). The data, technology and practices behind Data Science continue to evolve, and the TDSP has evolved in parallel. Over the past year, several new facets have been added, including: The IDEAR (Interactive Data Exploration, ... [Read more...]

Microsoft R Open (MRO), Microsoft's enhanced distribution of open source R, has been upgraded to version 3.4.2 and is now available for download for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This update upgrades the R language engine to the latest R 3.4.2 and updates the bundled packages. MRO is 100% compatible with all R packages. ... [Read more...]

Two new Microsoft webinars are taking place over the next week that may be of interest: AI Development in Azure using Data Science Virtual Machines The Azure Data Science Virtual Machine (DSVM) provides a comprehensive development and production environment to Data Scientists and AI-savvy developers. DSVMs are specialized virtual machine ... [Read more...]

R has a rich and infinitely flexible graphics system, and you can easily embed R graphics into Microsoft Office documents like PowerPoint or Word. The one thing I dread hearing after delivering such a document, though, is "how can I tweak that graphic?". I could change the colors or fonts ... [Read more...]

MicrosoftML is an R package for machine learning that works in tandem with the RevoScaleR package. (In order to use the MicrosoftML and RevoScaleR libraries, you need an installation of Microsoft Machine Learning Server or Microsoft R Client.) A great way to see what MicrosoftML can do is to take ... [Read more...]

Here's a refresher on the history of the R project: 1992: R development begins as a research project in Auckland, NZ by Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka 1993: First binary versions of R published at Statlib [see update, below] 1995: R first distributed as open-source software, under GPL2 license 1997: R core group formed 1997: ... [Read more...]

While there are hundreds of excellent books and websites devoted to R, the canonical source of truth regarding the R system remains the R manuals. You can find the manuals at your local CRAN mirror and on your laptop as part of the R distribution (try Help __ Manuals in RGui, ... [Read more...]

Taxis are plentiful and convenient in New York City, but the city is also served by a wide network of commuter bicycles (Citi Bikes). If you need to get from, say, the West Village to the Garment District, are you better off time-wise hailing a cab, or heading over to ... [Read more...]

The ROpenSci team has started publishing a new series of interviews with the goal of “demystifying the creative and development processes of R community members”. I had the great pleasure of being interviewed by Kelly O'Briant earlier this year, and the interview was published on Friday. Thanks for being a ... [Read more...]

Take a look at this list of 13 hot startups, from a list compiled by Alex Bresler. Perhaps one of them is the next Juicero? FAR ATHERA: A CLINICAL AI PLATFORM THAT CAN BE ACCESSED ON DEMAND. ZAPSY: TRY-AT-HOME SERVICE FOR CONSUMER ELECTRONICS. MADESS: ON-DEMAND ACCESS TO CLEAN WATER. DEERG: AI ... [Read more...]

Last week's R-themed crossword from R-Ladies DC was popular, so here's another R-related crossword, this time by Barry Rowlingson and published on page 39 of the June 2003 issue of R-news (now known as the R Journal). Unlike the last crossword, this one follows the conventions of a British cryptic crossword: the ... [Read more...]

The Azure Data Lake store is an Apache Hadoop file system compatible with HDFS, hosted and managed in the Azure Cloud. You can store and access the data within directly via the API, by connecting the filesystem directly to Azure HDInsight services, or via HDFS-compatible open-source applications. And for data ... [Read more...]