R Tools for Visual Studio, the open-source extenstion to Visual Studio that provides an IDE for the R language, has been upgraded to include several new features. The latest update, RTVS 0.3, now includes: An R package manager, allowing you to review, install, and uninstall packages using a convenient user interface. ... [Read more...]

R 3.3.0, a major annual update to the R Language, was released earlier this week and is now available from your local CRAN mirror for Windows, Mac (OSX 10.6 or later) and Linux systems. (Or as always, you can build it yourself from sources). This update — codenamed "Supposedly Educational" — makes a number ... [Read more...]

If you're looking for some musical nostalgia this weekend, look no further than How Music Taste Evolved, from design firm Polygraph (and with a hat tip to Pogue). Choose any month from the past six decades, and then sit back and watch the top 5 songs on the Billboard chart of ... [Read more...]

It's not an overstatement to say that, at least for me personally, Edward Tufte's book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information was transformative. Reading this book got me and, I feel confident saying, many many other data scientists passionate about visualizing data. This is the book that popularized Minard's chart ... [Read more...]

Naomi Robbins, author of Creating More Effective Graphs and Forbes contributor has teamed up with daughter Dr Joyce Robbins to present a new webinar this Thursday April 28, Creating Effective Graphs with Microsoft R Open. The webinar will demonstrate how to create a variety of useful graphics with R: comparisons, distributions, ... [Read more...]

M icrosoft R Open 3.2.4, Microsoft's enhanced distribution of R, is now available for download from mran.microsoft.com. This update is based on R 3.2.4-revised, and includes several improvements and some minor bug fixes from the R Core Group. Improvements include long-vector support for the smooth function, a new stringsAsFactors ... [Read more...]

You might think literary criticism is no place for statistical analysis, but given digital versions of the text you can, for example, use sentiment analysis to infer the dramatic arc of an Oscar Wilde novel. Now you can apply similar techniques to the works of Jane Austen thanks to Julia ... [Read more...]

As I mentioned yesterday, Microsoft R Server now available for HDInsight, which means that you can now run R code (including the big-data algorithms of Microsoft R Server) on a managed, cloud-based Hadoop instance. Debraj GuhaThakurta, Senior Data Scientist, and Shauheen Zahirazami, Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Microsoft, demonstrate some ... [Read more...]

If you want to train a statistical model on very large amounts of data, you'll need three things: a storage platform capable of holding all of the training data, a computational platform capable of efficently performing the heavy-duty mathematical computations required, and a statistical computing language with algorithms that can ... [Read more...]

Microsoft's Linux Data Science Virtual Machine is now available for use on the Azure Marketplace. Like the Windows-based instance of the Data Science VM, this pre-built system based on Linux CentOS 7.2 includes all the tools you'll need to analyze data, including Microsoft R Open, Anaconda Python, Jupyter Notebooks and a ... [Read more...]

Buzzfeed's Peter Aldhous and Charles Seife broke a major news story last week: the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Homeland Security operate more than 200 small aircraft (mainly Cessnas and some helicopters) which routinely circle various sites near US cities, presumably to gather data with onboard cameras and ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from February of particular interest to R users. Reviews of new CRAN packages RtutoR, lavaan.shiny, dCovTS, glmmsr, GLMMRR, MultivariateRandomForest, genie, kmlShape, deepboost and rEDM. You can now create and host Jupyter notebooks based on R, for free, in Azure ML ... [Read more...]

Airbnb, the property-rental marketplace that helps you find a place to stay when you're travelling, uses R to scale data science. Airbnb is a famously data-driven company, and has recently gone through a period of rapid growth. To accommodate the influx of data scientists (80% of whom are proficient in R, ... [Read more...]

The field of neuroscience -- the study of brains and the nervous system -- has taken some major leaps in recent years. Scientists can now gather real-time electrical activity from the brain during actions and thoughts, which is helping to pinpoint the exact location of brain lesions caused by strokes, ... [Read more...]

Data visualization with R doesn't always have to be serious. Here are a couple of fun charts created recently by R users. First, here's a minimalist rendition of the characters in The Simpsons, by an anonymous blogger: And from Alex Whan, here's a near-perfect recreation of the classic cover of ... [Read more...]

There's no denying that for a language as popular as R, it has more than its fair share of quirks. If you've ever wondered why, for example, R has a non-standard assignment operator, or that periods are allowed in symbols (and don't signify method calls), or that character data imports ... [Read more...]

If you're new to the concept of predictive models, or just want to review the background on how data scientists learn from past data to predict the future, you may be interested in my talk from the Data Insights Summit, Introduction to Real-Time Predictive Modeling. In the talk above I ... [Read more...]

Five months ago, the R Consortium asked the R Community to propose projects to benefit R users and the R project. Today, the R Consortium announced that it has awarded grants to fund seven of those projects. A unified framework for distributed computing with R An improved database interface A ... [Read more...]

March Madness is upon us here in the US. This annual college basketball competition pits 64 teams in a single-elimination tournament, and the team that goes undefeated for all 6 rounds will be named NCAA Champion. Predicting the winners of the competition, and in particular completing a "bracket" of the teams you ... [Read more...]

Just a quick heads up that Nina Zumel, co-founder and principal consultant at Win-Vector LLC will be presenting a webinar at 10AM Pacific Time on Thursday March 17, Data Preparation Techniques with R. Nina is the co-author of Practical Data Science with R and blogs frequently at the Win-Vector blog (and ... [Read more...]