I was recently alerted (thanks Maëlle and Mikhail!) to an enlightening presentation from last years' useR! conference. (This year's useR! conference takes place next week in Belgium.) Paul H Schuette, Scientific Computing Coordinator at the FDA Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER), talked about how R is used ... [Read more...]

Rmarkdown is an enormously useful system for combining text, output and graphics generated by R into a single document. Images, in particular, are a powerful means of communication in a report, whether they be data visualizations, diagrams, or pictures. To maximize the power of those images, Zev Ross has created ... [Read more...]

R is incredible software for statistics and data science. But while the bits and bytes of software are an essential component of its usefulness, software needs a community to be successful. And that's an area where R really shines, as Shannon Ellis explains in this lovely ROpenSci blog post. For ... [Read more...]

Power BI has long had the capability to include custom R charts in dashboards and reports. But in sharp contrast to standard Power BI visuals, these R charts were static. While R charts would update when the report data was refreshed or filtered, it wasn't possible to interact with an ... [Read more...]

The Windows edition of the Data Science Virtual Machine (DSVM), the all-in-one virtual machine image with a wide-collection of open-source and Microsoft data science tools, has been updated to the Windows Server 2016 platform. This update brings built-in support for Docker containers and GPU-based deep learning. GPU-based Deep Learning. While prior ... [Read more...]

For the past four years, recruiting firm Burtch Works has conducted a simple survey of data scientists with just one question: "Which do you prefer to use — SAS, R or Python". The results for this year's survey of 1,046 respondents are in: R: 40% (2016: 42%) SAS: 34% (2016: 39%) Python: 26% (2016: 20%) Compared to last year's results, Python ... [Read more...]

The sparklyr package (by RStudio) provides a high-level interface between R and Apache Spark. Among many other things, it allows you to filter and aggregate data in Spark using the dplyr syntax. In Microsoft R Server 9.1, you can now connect to a a Spark session using the sparklyr package as ... [Read more...]

The Mango team held their first instance of the EARL conference series in San Francisco last month, and it was a fantastic showcase of real-world applications of R. This was a smaller version of the EARL conferences in London and Boston, but with that came the opportunity to interact with ... [Read more...]

At the R/Finance conference last month, I demonstrated how to operationalize models developed in Microsoft R Server as web services using the mrsdeploy package. Then, I used that deployed model to generate predictions for loan delinquency, using a Python script as the client. (You can see slides here, and ... [Read more...]

For almost a year now, a collection of researchers from around the world has been collaborating to develop the next generation of analysis tools for disease outbreak response using R. The R Epidemics Consortium (RECON) creates R packages for handling, visualizing, and analyzing outbreak data using cutting-edge statistical methods, along ... [Read more...]

Putting R code into production generally involves orchestrating the execution of a series of R scripts. Even if much of the application logic is encoded into R packages, a run-time environment typically involves scripts to ingest and prepare data, run the application logic, validate the results, and operationalize the output. ... [Read more...]

While R (and its package ecosystem) provides a wealth of functions for querying and analyzing data, in our cloud-enabled world there's now a plethora of online services with APIs you can use to augment R's capabilities. Many of these APIs use a RESTful interface, which means you will typically send/... [Read more...]

The full schedule of talks for useR!2017, the global R user conference, has now been posted. The conference will feature 16 tutorials, 6 keynotes, 141 full talks, and 86 lightning talks starting on July 5 in Brussels. That's a lot to fir into 4 days, but I'm especially looking forward to the keynote presentations: 20 years of ... [Read more...]

At the EARL conference in San Francisco this week, JS Tan from Microsoft gave an update (PDF slides here) on the doAzureParallel package . As we've noted here before, this package allows you to easily distribute parallel R computations to an Azure cluster. The package was recently updated to support using ... [Read more...]

Choropleths are a common approach to visualizing data on geographic maps. But choropleths — by design or necessity — aggregate individual data points into a single geographic region (like a country or census tract), which is all shaded a single colour. This can introduce interpretability issues (are we seeing changes in the ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from May of particular interest to R users. Many interesting presentations recorded at the R/Finance 2017 conference in Chicago are now available to watch. A review of some of the R packages and projects implemented at the 2017 ROpenSci Unconference. An example ... [Read more...]

A new (and free!) e-book on extending the capabilities of Power BI with R is now available for download, from analytics consultancy BlueGranite. The introduction to the book explains why R and Power BI are a great match together: As a specialized, open source statistical environment, R represents the primary ... [Read more...]

As I mentioned earlier this week, I was on a team at the ROpenSci Unconference (with Brooke Anderson, Karl Broman, Gergely Daróczi, and my Microsoft colleagues Mario Inchiosa and Ali Zaidi) to work on a project to interface the R language with Minecraft. The resulting R package, miner, is ... [Read more...]

The results of KDnuggets' 18th annual poll of data science software usage are in, and for the first time in three years Python has edged out R as the most popular software. While R increased its share of usage from 45.7% in last year's poll to 52.1% this year, Python's usage among ... [Read more...]

It was another great year for the R/Finance conference, held earlier this month in Chicago. This is normally a fairly private affair: with attendance capped at around 300 people every year, it's a somewhat exclusive gathering of the best and brightest minds from industry and academia in financial data analysis ... [Read more...]