Tomas Kalibera, the newest member of the R Core Team, has been working for the last several years with fellow Core Team member Luke Tierney implementing R's byte-code compiler and interpreter. Byte-compiling R code often improves its speed of execution, and usually happens without you having to take any explicit ... [Read more...]

The accidental aRt tumblr (mentioned here a few years ago) continues to provide a steady stream of images that wouldn't look out of place in a modern art gallery, but which in fact are data visualizations (mostly attempted in R), gone wrong. (Here's a typical recent entry.) But now, Giora ... [Read more...]

Given a short review of a product, like "I couldn't put it down!", can you predict what the product is? In that case it's pretty easy — it's for a book — but this general problem of text categorization comes up in a lot of natural language analysis problems. In his talk ... [Read more...]

The Solutions section of the Cortana Intelligence Gallery provides more than two dozen working examples of applying machine learning, data science and artificial intelligence to real-world problems. Each solution provides sample data, scripts for model training and evaluation, and reporting of predictions. You can deploy a complete stack in Azure ... [Read more...]

At the useR! conference last month, Jim Hester gave a talk about two packages that provide a modern database interface for R. Those packages are the odbc package (developed by Jim and other members of the RStudio team), and the DBI package (developed by Kirill Müller with support from ... [Read more...]

H2O.ai is an open-source AI platform that provides a number of machine-learning algorithms that run on the Spark distributed computing framework. Azure HDInsight is Microsoft's fully-managed Apache Hadoop platform in the cloud, which makes it easy to spin up and manage Azure clusters of any size. It's also ... [Read more...]

The foreach package provides a simple looping construct for R: the foreach function, which you may be familiar with from other languages like Javascript or C#. It's basically a function-based version of a "for" loop. But what makes foreach useful isn't iteration: it's the way it makes it easy to ... [Read more...]

R is an object-oriented language with several object-orientation systems. There's the original (and still widely-used) S3 class system based on the "class" attribute. There's the somewhat stricter, signature-based S4 class system. There are reference classes (also called R5), which provide R objects with multiple references without duplicating data in memory. ... [Read more...]

This is a joyplot: a series of histograms, density plots or time series for a number of data segments, all aligned to the same horizontal scale and presented with a slight overlap. Peak time for sports and leisure #dataviz. About time for a joyplot; might do a write-up on them. #... [Read more...]

SQL Server 2017, the next major release of the SQL Server database, has been available as a community preview for around 8 months, but now the first full-featured release candidate is available for public preview. For those looking to do data science with data in SQL Server, there are a number of ... [Read more...]

At the useR!2017 conference earlier this month, my colleague Ali Zaidi gave a presentation on using Neural Embeddings to analyze GitHub pull request comments (processed using the tidy text framework). The data analysis was done using R and distributed on Spark, and the resulting neural network trained using the Microsoft ... [Read more...]

IEEE Spectrum has published its fourth annual ranking of of top programming languages, and the R language is again featured in the Top 10. This year R ranks at #6, down a spot from its 2016 ranking (and with an IEEE score — derived from search, social media, and job listing trends — tied with ... [Read more...]

Rafael Irizarry from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health has presented a number of courses on R and Biostatistics on EdX, and he recently also provided an index of all of the course modules as YouTube videos with supplemental materials. The EdX courses are linked below, which ... [Read more...]

If you use an API key to access a secure service, or need to use a password to access a protected database, you'll need to provide these "secrets" in your R code somewhere. That's easy to do if you just include those keys as strings in your code — but it's ... [Read more...]

The annual useR!2017 conference took place July 4-7 in Brussels, and in every dimension it was the best yet. It was the largest (with over 1,100 R users from around the world in attendance), and yet still very smoothly run with many amazing talks and lots of fun for everyone. If ... [Read more...]

My lightning talk at the useR!2017 conference was R in Minecraft: a five-minute tour of the miner and craft packages and associated book designed to teach kids how to use the R language while manipulating the world of Minecraft. You can see my talk below (starting at the 10:40 mark), and ... [Read more...]

The presentations and tutorials are starting to become available at the Channel 9 useR!2017 page. There's a wealth of amazing content to explore there already, and I wanted to call out one presentation in particular: Uwe Ligges' keynote presentation, 20 years of CRAN. There are many reasons for the success of R: ... [Read more...]

Since its foundation just a little over two years ago, the R Consortium has been dedicated to providing support to the R Project and the R community. Already, the R Consortium has channeled the contributions from its corporate members to fund more than 25 projects, working groups, and community initiatives. Recently ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from June of particular interest to R users. R 3.4.1 "Single Candle" has been released. The Scientific Computing Coordinator at the FDA explains how R is used at the FDA and by sponsors for clinical trial submissions. Several useful tips related to ... [Read more...]

In the sponsor presentation for Microsoft at the useR!2017 conference in Brussels this morning, I thought I'd share how perceptions of R have changed over the years. Today, R known as is popular, comprehensive, accepted, scalable, production-ready and supported software environment for data analysis, but that wasn't always the case. ... [Read more...]