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...]

The useR! 2016 conference, the annual gathering of R users from around the world, is already underway at Stanford University. Today is a day of interactive tutorials, and the presentation program begins tomorrow. But don't worry if you weren't able to make it to California, or if you missed out on ... [Read more...]

I'm a regular user of Amazon Video: as someone who spends a fair bit of time on planes, it's great to be able to download some of my favourite shows (hello, Orphan Black and Vikings) and catch up on episodes during the trip. Amazon Video has a useful feature, too: ... [Read more...]

Peter Dalgaard announced yesterday on behalf of the R core team that R 3.3.1, the latest update to the R language, is now available for download from your local CRAN mirror. As of this writing, binaries of R 3.3.1 are available for Windows and Linux; the Mac version should appear very soon. ... [Read more...]

The forecast package for R, created and maintained by Professor Rob Hyndman of Monash University, is one of the more useful R packages available available on CRAN. Statistical forecasting — the process of predicting the future value of a time series — is used in just about every realm of data analysis, ... [Read more...]

Congratulations to Peter Aldhous and Charles Seife of Buzzfeed News, winners of the 2016 Data Journalism Award for Data Visualization of the Year. They were recognized by their reporting for Spies in the Sky, which analyzed FAA air traffic records to visulize the domestic surveillance activities of the US government. Aldhouse ... [Read more...]

While there are many admirable efforts to increase participation by women in STEM fields, in many programming teams men still outnumber women, often by a significant margin. Specifically by how much is a fraught question, and accurate statistics are hard to come by. Another interesting question is whether the gender ... [Read more...]

The open-source R language is the most frequently used analytics / data science software, selected by 49% of the 2895 voters of the 2016 KDNuggets Software Poll. (R was also the top selection in last year's poll.) Python was a close second at 45.8%, and SQL was third at 35.5%. (Respondents could select multiple tools in ... [Read more...]

Randy George, an expert in web map applications, has been fascinated with computer graphics (especially maps) since the early '80s. For much of that time, he says, the technology for mapping has been pretty static: The main stay of web mapping applications for the last couple of decades has ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from May of particular interest to R users. A 3-part tutorial on principal components regression in R: part 1, part 2, and part 3. Implications of the fact that in R, names have objects (and not vice-versa). Highlights of the R/Finance 2016 conference, according ... [Read more...]

Ross Ihaka, one of the co-creators of R (along with Robert Gentleman), recently gave an interview to the University of Auckland's alumni magazine, Ingenio. In the article, he shares the story of the genesis of R in the early 1990s: The story all began back in the early 1990s when ... [Read more...]

As more settlements in Texas and France are impacted by severe flooding, this is a good time to thank the hydrologists at the NOAA who forecast river level rises in advance and give residents in affected areas time to move to higher ground. Along with topgraphic, rainfall, and weather data, ... [Read more...]

No, it's not a Jaqen H'ghar quote. Recently, Hadley Wickham tweeted the following image: While this image isn't included in Hadley's Advanced R book, he does discuss many of the implications there. The most significant of these is that creating a copy of an object in R doesn't consume any ... [Read more...]

Recently, I wrote about how it's possible to use predictive models to predict when an airline engine will require maintenance, and use that prediction to avoid unpleasant (and expensive!) delays for passengers on the ground. Planes generate a lot of data that can be used to make such predictions: today’... [Read more...]

Unlike most other statistical software packages, R doesn't have a native data file format. You can certainly import and export data in any number of formats, but there's no native "R data file format". The closest equivalent is the saveRDS/loadRDS function pair, which allows you to serialize an R ... [Read more...]

Microsoft R Open 3.2.5 is now available for download. There are no changes of note in the R langauge engine with this release (R 3.2.5 was just a largely a version number increment). There's lots new on the packages front though: Microsoft R Open 3.2.5 has a default CRAN snapshot date of May 1, 2016 ... [Read more...]

Apache Spark, the open-source cluster computing framework, will soon see a major update with the upcoming release of Spark 2.0. This update promises to be faster than Spark 1.6, thanks to a run-time compiler that generates optimized bytecode. It also promises to be easier for developers to use, with streamlined APIs and ... [Read more...]

If you've been thinking about trying the big-data capabilities of Microsoft R Server but wanted to check out the documentation first, you're in luck: the complete Microsoft R Server documentation is now available on MSDN (and is accessible to anyone). There's lots to explore here, but a few highlights you ... [Read more...]