Microsoft officially launched SQL Server 2016 at the Data Driven event in New York City last week, and R featured prominently. One of the highlights from Joseph Sirosh's keynote was a demonstration of the World Wide Telescope, an online tool that allows budding astronomers (and professionals!) to explore the visible universe ... [Read more...]

The R Core Group announced yesterday the release of R 3.2.4, the final update in the R 3.2.x series. (R 3.3.0 is scheduled for release on April 14.) This update, codenamed "Very Secure Dishes", makes a few minor improvements and bug fixes, including long vector support for the smooth function, some improvements in ... [Read more...]

It's official! R Tools for Visual Studio, until now only available as a private preview, is now in public preview and available to everyone as a free, open-source download. RTVS is an add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio, which adds R language development capabilities to the popular Windows-based IDE. If you ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from February of particular interest to R users. A tutorial on presenting interactive versions of R maps in PowerBI. An animation of Japan's population pyramid through 2050 based on US Census Bureau demographic projections. Interactive visualizations of multivariate data in R with ... [Read more...]

With the US election season in full swing, you can hardly browse a newspaper website without seeing some kind of map showing election or polling results, like this one from the New York Times. With election data (usually) accessible online, and a wealth of mapping tools available in the R ... [Read more...]

The first official release of R, R version 1.0.0 was released on February 29, 2000. The anniversary was marked on Twitter by Thomas Lumley, a member of R Core Group: 20 leading statisicians and computer scientists (and 4 alums) from around the world without whom the R Project would not exist. That makes it 16 years — ... [Read more...]

Microsoft has updated the Data Science Virtual Machine, a data science toolkit-in-a-box that you can easily spin up on the Microsoft Azure cloud service. The virtual machine now comes pre-configured with Microsoft R Server Developer Edition (upgraded from Microsoft R Open), Anaconda Python, Jupyter notebooks for Python and R, Visual ... [Read more...]

One of benefit of integrating R with PowerBI is access to rich array of data visulizations not present in the standard PowerBI loadout. R is practically unlimited in the types of graphics it can create (although the amount of programming required can vary from a few lines using an existing ... [Read more...]

The US Census makes a number of its databases available to developers via the Census API. One of those databases is the International Data Base, in which the Census department provides historic demographic breakdowns (population by age and sex) for many countries, along with projections through 2050. Kyle Walker created the ... [Read more...]

New Zealand's Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment has just released the New Zealand Tourism Dashboard, an interactive application which allows NZ residents (and curious onlookers everywhere) to explore the economic impact of tourism in the far-flung nation. The dashboard is implemented using Shiny, and all of the graphics and ... [Read more...]

Analyst firm RedMonk have updated their (near-)biannual Programming Lanuage rankings as of January 2016, and the R language ranks at #13, unchanged since the last ranking in June 2015. Redmonk's rankings are based on number of projects in GitHub and number of questions tagged in StackOverflow, and the most recent data is ... [Read more...]

We've released a minor update to Microsoft R Open 3.2.3 to address issues that some people were experiencing. The update available now on MRAN fixes the following issues: The Windows R GUI (RGUI.exe) could crash when typing beyond the bounds of the visible window. The "R" command wasn't available from ... [Read more...]

R user and developer Lionel Henry proposes a number of changes to R syntax: Use square brackets to create lists. You could use [1, 2:5, "hello"] to create a list of three elements. Nested lists would be possible as well, with syntax like or [ [1, 2], [2, 3] ] (much easier than list(list(1,2),list(2,3))). Define lambda ... [Read more...]

If you missed the recent webinar presented by Derek Norton, Using Microsoft R Server to Address Scalability Issues in R, you can now catch up with the replay below. In the webinar, Derek compares Microsoft R Open and Microsoft R Server, and demonstrates using Microsoft R Server to model a 40... [Read more...]

The latest update to RStudio, the cross-platform open-source integrated development environment for the R language from the team at RStudio, adds many new features for R developers. But perhaps the most significant update is one which allows R developers to add their own new features to RStudio: add-ins. RStudio Add-ins ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from January of particular interest to R users. Animated visualizations and analysis of data from NYC's municipal bike program, created with R. Many local R user groups are sharing materials from meetups using Github. A detailed R tutorial on analyzing your ... [Read more...]

If you have a database of credit-card transactions with a small percentage tagged as fraudulent, how can you create a process that automatically flags likely fraudulent transactions in the future? That's the premise behind the latest Data Science Deep Dive on MSDN. This tutorial provides a step by step to ... [Read more...]

We had a fantastic turnout to last week's webinar, Introduction to Microsoft R Open. If you missed it, you can watch the replay below. In the talk, I gives some background on the R language and its applications, describe the performance and reproducibility benefits of Microsoft R Open, and give ... [Read more...]

If you're one of those people that dreads long plane flights, this map by Matt Strimas-Mackey will help you find routes to avoid. It shows Wikipedia's list of the top 30 scheduled commercial flights by distance (with code-share duplicates removed), represented as a map showing the routes colour-coded by the time ... [Read more...]

There's more to Iowa than just today's presidential primary. Last month, the Central Iowa R User Group hosted Dr. Max Kuhn, Director of Non-Clinical Statistics at Pfizer Global R&D, via video-chat to present on Applied Predictive Modeling with R. Max is the co-author of the excellent book Applied Predictive ... [Read more...]