When the RStudio first came on the scene in February 2011, there wasn't much in the way of tools for developers using the R language. The R GUI on Windows and Mac had a basic code-editing window, and there were a couple of menu-based GUIs like Rattle and R Commander that ... [Read more...]

If the media coverage is anything to go by, people are desperate to know who will win the US election on November 8. Polls give us some indication of what's likely to happen, but any single poll isn't a great guide (despite the hype that accompanies some of them). One poll ... [Read more...]

R 3.3.2, the latest update to the R language, was released today. Binary releases for Linux and Mac are available now from your local CRAN mirror, and the Windows builds will be available shortly. As a minor update to the R 3.3 series, this update focuses mainly on fixing bugs and doesn't ... [Read more...]

There's a new e-book available to download free from Microsoft Academy: Data Science with Microsoft SQL Server 2016. This 90-page e-book is aimed at data scientists who already have some experience in R, but want to learn how to use R wirth SQL Server. The book was written by some of ... [Read more...]

As much as we data scientists would like to work solely in R, there inevitably comes the time when our managers or customers want to see the fruits of our labours as a Word document or PowerPoint presentation. And not just any old document: it needs to be in the ... [Read more...]

If you're developing a package for R to share with others — on CRAN, say — you'll want to make sure it works for others. That means testing it on various platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, and all the versions thereof), and on various versions of R (current, past, and future). But it's ... [Read more...]

If you didn't have a chance to catch my presentation at the Machine Learning and Data Science Summit, I'll be reprising an updated version of the talk in a live webinar on Tuesday, November 1. I'll also be taking questions from the audience after the webinar. You can register here, and ... [Read more...]

Temperament has been a key issue in the 2016 presidential election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and an issue highlighted in the series of three debates that concluded this week. Quantifying "temperament" isn't an easy task, but The Economist used the Microsoft Emotion API to chart the anger, contempt, sadness ... [Read more...]

Once upon a time, there was the original R Graph Gallery, by Romain François. Sadly, it's been unavailable for several years. Now there's a new R Graph Gallery to fill the void, created by Yan Holtz. It contains more than 200 data visualizations categorized by type, along with the R ... [Read more...]

R Tools for Visual Studio, the open-source Visual Studio add-in for R programmers, has a new update available for download. RTVS 0.5 makes it easier to run R within SQL Server 2016 as a stored procedure, and supports multiple windows for R graphics. RTVS 0.5 makes use of Visual Studio's polyglot nature so ... [Read more...]

As more and more organizations are setting up teams of data scientists to make sense of the massive amounts of data they collect, the need grows for a standardized process for managing the work of those teams. To help with this, the data science team at Microsoft has drawn on ... [Read more...]

In this busy election season (here in the US, at least), we're seeing a lot of maps. Some states are red, some states are blue. But there's a problem: voters are not evenly distributed throughout the United States. In this map (the firethirtyeight.com US election forecast on October 13) Montana (... [Read more...]

If you'd like to learn how to run R within Azure Machine Learning and SQL Server, you may be interested in these upcoming 4-day Practical Data Science courses, presented by Rafal Lukawiecki from Project Botticelli. In this classroom-based course, you will learn machine learning, data mining, some statistics, data preparation, ... [Read more...]

If you'd like to manipulate and analyze very large data sets with the R language, one option is to use R and Apache Spark together. R provides the simple, data-oriented language for specifying transformations and models; Spark provides the storage and computation engine to handle data much larger than R ... [Read more...]

Due to anthropogenic climate change, the average global temperature has increased steadily over the past decade or so. While we're all familiar with the hockey-stick line chart of rising temperature, the change is even more dramatic on this animated globe showing the local effects of climate change. The first half ... [Read more...]

R's ggplot2 package is a well-known tool for producing beautiful static data visualizations that you can include in a printed report. But what if you want to include a ggplot2 graphic on a webpage and provide the ability for the user to interact with the data? The ggiraph package by ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from September of particular interest to R users. The R-Ladies meetups and the Women in R Taskforce support gender diversity in the R community. Highlights from the Microsoft Data Science Summit include recordings of many presentations about R, and the keynote "... [Read more...]

Regardless of the tool you use to analyse data, you'll often have to access data living in file formats generated by other tools. The "haven" package from RStudio allows you to import and export data in SAS, SPSS and Stata formats. Version 1.0 was released on October 4, and is now available ... [Read more...]

The results of many scientific papers are wrong. There are many reasons for this, including p-hacking, publication bias, and the general inability to replicate results. But there's another, more mundane cause: incorrect calculation of p-values in statistical tests. This could be caused by simple transcription errors when plugging numbers into ... [Read more...]

It's been a long time since I watched the The Simpsons, but I was always under the impression that Bart was the primary character. Perhaps it was all the Do the Bartman and "Cowabunga!" nonsense from the 90s. Anyway, data scientist Todd W Schneider used R to analyze the scripts ... [Read more...]