On August 26 Hurricane Harvey became the largest hurricane to make landfall in the United States in over 20 years. (That record may yet be broken by Irma, now bearing down on the Florida peninsula.) Harvey's rains brought major flooding to Houston and other coastal areas in the Gulf of Mexico. You ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from August of particular interest to R users. Using the featurizeText function in the MicrosoftML package to extract ngrams from unstructured text. A joyplot visualizes the probabilities associated with phrases like "highly likely" and "little chance" by a sample of 46 Redditors. ... [Read more...]

Version 3.4 of the Knime Analytics Platform, the open-source data science workflow toolbox, was released back in July. With that release came new integrations with Azure and Microsoft R Server, which were highlighted in a recent blog post. With Knime 3.4, you can use Microsoft R Server packages in an R node, ... [Read more...]

The next event in the Effective Applications of the R Language (EARL) conference series takes place next week, with EARL London 2017. The EARL conference series got its start in London, and the London event remains the biggest and brightest of the venues. This year's program is no exception, with an ... [Read more...]

PeerJ Preprints has recently published a collection of articles that focus on the practical side of statistical analysis: Practical Data Science for Stats. While the articles are not peer-reviewed, they have been selected and edited by Jennifer Bryan and Hadley Wickham, both well-respected members of the R community. And while ... [Read more...]

Last week I wrote about how you can use the MicrosoftML package in Microsoft R to featurize images: reduce an image to a vector of 4096 numbers that quantify the essential characteristics of the image, according to an AI vision model. You can perform a similar featurization process with text as ... [Read more...]

What kind of probability are people talking about when they say something is "highly likely" or has "almost no chance"? The chart below, created by Reddit user zonination, visualizes the responses of 46 other Reddit users to "What probability would you assign to the phase: " for various statements of probability. Each ... [Read more...]

R is often used to visualize and animate 2-dimensional data. (Here are just a few examples.) But did you know you can create 3-dimensional animations as well? As Thomas Lins Pedersen explains in a recent blog post, the trick is in using the persp function to translate points in 3-D ... [Read more...]

Computerworld's Sharon Machlis has published a very useful tutorial on creating geographic data maps with R. (The tutorial was actually published back in March, but I only came across it recently.) While it's been possible to create maps in R for a long time, some recent packages and data APIs ... [Read more...]

In Power BI, the dashboarding and reporting tool, you can use R to filter, transform, or restructure data via the Query Editor. For example, you could use the mice package to impute missing values, or use the tidytext package to assign sentiment scores to text inputs. As Imke Feldmann explains, ... [Read more...]

Minard's chart depicting Napoleon's 1812 march on Russia is a classic of data visualization that has inspired many homages using different time-and-place data. If you'd like to recreate the original chart, or create one of your own, Andrew Heiss has created a tutorial on using the ggplot2 package to re-envision the ... [Read more...]

What do women do in films? If you analyze the stage directions in film scripts — as Julia Silge, Russell Goldenberg and Amber Thomas have done for this visual essay for ThePudding — it seems that women (but not men) are written to snuggle, giggle and squeal, while men (but not women) ... [Read more...]

I will be at the AI Summit in San Francisco next month, which means I can't make it to Ignite in Orlando this year. Which is a bit of a shame, because there's a fantastic Data Science track at Ignite. There are 25 sessions on offer, with presentations from my Microsoft ... [Read more...]

Making your code run faster is often the primary goal when using parallel programming techniques in R, but sometimes the effort of converting your code to use a parallel framework leads only to disappointment, at least initially. Norman Matloff, author of Parallel Computing for Data Science: With Examples in R, ... [Read more...]

The first "official" version of R, version 1.0.0, was released on February 29, 200. But the R Project had already been underway for several years before then. Sharing this tweet, from yesterday, from R Core member Peter Dalgaard: It was twenty years ago today, Ross Ihaka got the band to play.... #rstats pic.... [Read more...]

Microsoft Cognitive Services provides several APIs for image recognition, but if you want to build your own recognizer (or create one that works offline), you can use the new Image Featurizer capabilities of Microsoft R Server. The process of training an image recognition system requires LOTS of images — millions and ... [Read more...]

Last year, Buzzfeed broke the story that US law enforcement agencies were using small aircraft to observe points of interest in US cities, thanks to analysis of public flight-records data. With the data journalism team no doubt realizing that the Flightradar24 data set hosted many more stories of public interest, ... [Read more...]

Timo Grossenbacher, data journalist with Swiss Radio and TV in Zurich, had a bit of a surprise when he attempted to recreate the results of one of the R Markdown scripts published by SRF Data to accompany their data journalism story about vested interests of Swiss members of parliament. Upon ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from July of particular interest to R users. A tutorial on using the rsparkling package to apply H20's algorithms to data in HDInsight. Several exercises to learn parallel programming with the foreach package. A presentation on the R6 class system, ... [Read more...]

In SQL Server 2016 and later, you can publish an R function to the database as a stored procedure. This makes it possible to run your R function on the SQL Server itself, which makes the power of that server available for R computations, and also eliminates the time required to ... [Read more...]