R has some good tools for importing data from spreadsheets, among them the readxl package for Excel and the googlesheets package for Google Sheets. But these only work well when the data in the spreadsheet are arranged as a rectangular table, and not overly encumbered with formatting or generated with ... [Read more...]

Len Kiefer, Deputy Chief Economist at Freddie Mac, recently published the following chart to his personal blog showing household debt in the United States (excluding mortgage debt). As you can see, student loan debt has steadily increased over the last 13 years and has now eclipsed all other forms of non-mortgage ... [Read more...]

My colleagues Max Kaznady, Jason Zhang, Arijit Tarafdar and Miguel Fierro recently posted a really useful guide with lots of tips to speed up prototyping models with Microsoft R Server on Apache Spark. These tips apply when using Spark on Azure HDInsight, where you can spin up a Spark cluster ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from July of particular interest to R users. R moves up to 5th place in the annual IEEE Spectrum programming language rankings. A guide to R-related presentations at the JSM 2016 conference. FiveThirtyEight uses R extensively for data journalism, as explained in ... [Read more...]

Hadley Wickham's dplyr package is an amazing tool for restructuring, filtering, and aggregating data sets using its elegant grammar of data manipulation. By default, it works on in-memory data frames, which means you're limited to the amount of data you can fit into R's memory. Hadley also provided an extension ... [Read more...]

While many media properties including the New York Times, FiveThirtyEight and FlowingData use the R language to prepare graphics for publication, they often use Adobe Illustrator or similar graphics tools to touch up the last 5% or so of the graphics. Not so for Switzerland's news site swissinfo.ch, whose data ... [Read more...]

We recently had to decomission inside-r.org, the R resources site created by Revolution Analytics in 2010. Links to inside-r.org now redirect to MRAN, which now contains much of the material which was there, including an R package directory, examples of R applications, and a guide for getting started with ... [Read more...]

In Azure ML Studio, you use a browser-based "workbench" tool to flow data through pre-built data munging, machine learning and predictive modeling modules. These pre-built components perform computations in the Azure cloud and cover just about everything you'd want to do with data, including data transformation tools (add/remove columns, ... [Read more...]

IEEE Spectrum has just published its third annual ranking with its 2016 Top Programming Languages, and the R Language is once again near the top of the list, moving up one place to fifth position. As I said last year (when R moved up to take sixth place), this is an ... [Read more...]

Since it expanded its focus from predicting the US election, FiveThirtyEight has emerged as a prominent source of in-depth data journalism, with data-driven analysis of media, culture, politics and society. A recent feature combined CDC and independent data sources to break down the nearly 34,000 gun deaths in the US in 2014 ... [Read more...]

Microsoft R Open 3.3.0, the enhanced distribution of open source R, is now available for download for Windows, Mac and Linux systems. This release includes a significant updates to the R language engine from the R Core Group bundled with the multithreaded performance and CRAN package time-machine capabilities of Microsoft R ... [Read more...]

Microsoft has a brand-new conference, exclusively for data scientists, big data engineers, and machine learning practitioners. The Microsoft Data Science Summit, to be held in Atlanta GA, September 26-27, will feature talks and lab sessions from Microsoft engineers and thought leaders on using data science techniques and Microsoft technology, applied ... [Read more...]

As anyone who has tried Pokémon Go recently is probably aware, Pokémon come in different types. A Pokémon's type affects where and when it appears, and the types of attacks it is vulnerable to. Some types, like Normal, Water and Grass are common; others, like Fairy and ... [Read more...]

Here's a little puzzle that might shed some light on some apparently confusing behaviour by missing values (NAs) in R: What is NA^0 in R? You can get the answer easily by typing at the R command line: __ NA^0 [1] 1 But the interesting question that arises is: why is it 1? Most ... [Read more...]

At the useR! conference last month, I was pleased to be able to give a couple of talks about the ways that Microsoft is using and integrating R. In my first talk, Hear, See, Move, I shared how data scientists at Microsoft are working to help the disabled: During the ... [Read more...]

Over the years, we've shared several posts on using the ScaleR package to import, process, visualize and analyze large data sets with R. Until now, you needed to have access to a Microsoft R Server license to take advantage of the package. Now, you can use all of the capabilities ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from June of particular interest to R users. A preview of the tutorials presented at the useR! 2016 conference. A "advanced beginner's" guide to R published by ComputerWorld includes guides on data wrangling, visualization, and data APIs. Microsoft R Server now runs ... [Read more...]

Before there was R, there was S. R was modeled on a language developed at AT&T Bell Labs starting in 1976 by Rick Becker and John Chambers (and, later, Alan Wilks) along with Doug Dunn, Jean McRae, and Judy Schilling. At last week's useR! conference, Rick Becker gave a fascinating ... [Read more...]

We've shown a few times here how you can run R code on data in the cloud with Azure ML Studio, and even how to enable that code as a web service to be called from other applications. But what if you want to run code in a compiled language, ... [Read more...]

Many newcomers to R got their start learning the language with Computerworld's Beginner's Guide to R, a 6-part introduction to the basics of the language. Now, budding R users who want to take their skills to the next level have a new guide to help them: Computerword's Advanced Beginner's Guide ... [Read more...]