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...]

Like many modern cities, New York offers a public pick-up/drop-off bicycle service (called Citi Bikes). Subscribing City Bike members can grab a bike from almost 500 stations scattered around the city, hop on and ride to their destination, and drop the bike at a nearby station. (Visitors to the city ... [Read more...]

Astronomer and budding data scientist Julia Silge has been using R for less than a year, but based on the posts using R on her blog has already become very proficient at using R to analyze some interesting data sets. She has posted detailed analyses of water consumption data and ... [Read more...]

The American Community Survey, conducted by the US Census Bureau, collects data from around 3.5 million households each year in order to estimate various demographic statistics of the US population, including appliances installed in the home, languages spoken, work experience and much more (here's the complete data dictionary). The data science ... [Read more...]

A quick heads-up that I'll be presenting a live webinar on Thursday January 28, Introduction to Microsoft R Open. If you know anyone that should get to know R and/or Microsoft R Open, send 'em along. Here's the abstract: Data Science is a strategic initiative for most companies today, who ... [Read more...]

Microsoft R Open 3.2.3, the performance-enhanced distribution of R 3.2.3, is now available for download from mran.microsoft.com. This is the latest (and first of many to come!) update to Revolution R Open under its new name. In addition to the improvements in R 3.2.3, this update to MRO brings support for ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from December of particular interest to R users. A look back at accomplishments of the R Project and community in 2015. Segmented regression with the "segmented" package, applied to long-distance running records. Creating multi-tab reports in R with knitr and jQuery UI. ... [Read more...]

You might have missed one significant bit of news tucked into yesterday's Microsoft R announcement: R is coming to Visual Studio: R Tools for Visual Studio (RTVS) follows the model of Python Tools for Visual Studio: it's an open-source plug-in to Visual Studio that makes it a complete IDE for ... [Read more...]

In the nine months since Microsoft acquired Revolution Analytics, there have been a steady stream of updates to Revolution R Open and Revolution R Enterprise (not to mention integration of R with SQL Server, PowerBI, Azure and Cortana Analytics). Now, we have yet more updates to announce along with fresh ... [Read more...]

If you've ever created a scatterplot with text labels using the text function in R, or the geom_text function in the ggplot2 package, you've probably found that the text labels can easily overlap, rendering some of them unreadable. Now, thanks to the new extensibility capabilities of the ggplot2 package, ... [Read more...]

The scientific process has been going through a welcome period of introspection recently, with a focus on understanding just how reliable the results of scientific studies are. We're not talking here about scientific fraud, but how the scientific process itself and the focus on p-values (which not even statisticians can ... [Read more...]

If you want to get started doing data science with R in the cloud, a good place to start is Stephen Elston's free O'Reilly report, Data Science in the Cloud with Azure ML and R. But if you learn better with a show-and-tell approach, he now also has an O'Reilly ... [Read more...]

One of the themes of the Christmas movie classic Love Actually is the interconnections between people of different communities and cultures, from the Prime Minister of the UK to a young student in London. StackOverflow's David Robinson brings these connections to life by visualizing the network diagram of 20 characters in ... [Read more...]

Happy New Year everyone! It's hard to believe that this blog has now been going since 2008: our anniversary was on December 9. Thanks to everyone who has supported this blog over the past 7 years by reading, sharing and commenting on our posts, and an extra special thanks to my co-bloggers Joe ... [Read more...]

It's been a banner year for the R project in 2015, with frequent new releases, ever-growing popularity, a flourishing ecosystem, and accolades from both users and press. Here's a roundup of the big events for R from 2015. R continues to advance under the new leadership of the R Foundation. There were ... [Read more...]

by Matt Parker, Data Scientist at Microsoft One of the great advantages of R's openness is its extensibility. R's abundant packages are the most conspicuous example of that extensibility, and Revolution R Enterprise is a powerful example of how far it can stretch. But R is also part of an ... [Read more...]

Despite the ggplot2 project — the most popular data visualization package for R — being in maintenance mode, RStudio's Hadley Wickham has given the R community a surprise gift with a version 2.0.0 update for ggplot2. According to Hadley this is a "huge" update with more than 100 fixes and improvements. The most significant ... [Read more...]

On this Christmas Day, allow me to share a couple of interesting takes on Mariah Carey's modern Christmas classic, All I Want for Christmas is You. (Unlike most pop songs, Carey wrote the melody and lyrics herself.) If you've somehow managed to avoid hearing the song over the past decade, ... [Read more...]