You may have heard that R and the big-data RevoScaleR package have been integrated with with SQL Server 2016 as SQL Server R Services. If you've been wanting to try out R with SQL Server but haven't been sure where to start, a new MSDN tutorial will take you through all ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from November of particular interest to R users. You can use emojis as plotting symbols in ggplot2 charts with the emoGG package. A review of local R user group activity in 2015. Giving thanks to the R Core Group. Some best practices ... [Read more...]

Yesterday, the R Core Team released a new update to R (version 3.2.3, codenamed "Wooden Christmas Tree"), and the source distribution is now available for download on CRAN. Binary versions for Windows, Mac and Linux are also available for download from your local CRAN mirror. This release makes a few small ... [Read more...]

Google Trends is a useful way to compare changes in popularity of certain search terms over time, and Google Trends data can be used as a proxy for all sorts of difficult-to-measure quantities like economic activity and disease propagation. If you'd like to use Google Trends data in your own ... [Read more...]

Maarten Hermans is a sociologist and researcher at KU Leuven in Belgium and an avid hiker. He uses an Android app to track his location and elevation on his hikes, which means he can download his hike data in GPS Exchange Format. With this data and a few R packages, ... [Read more...]

Earlier this week, Andrie showed you how to set up and provision your own virtual machine (VM) to run R and RStudio in Azure. Another option is to use the new Microsoft Data Science Virtual Machine, a pre-configured instance that includes a suite of tools useful to data scientists, including: ... [Read more...]

R user David Lawrence Miller has created an extension for R's ggplot2 package that allows you to use emojis as plotting symbols. The emoGG package (currently only available on github) adds the geom_emoji geom to ggplot2, which uses an emoji code to identify the plotting symbol. For example: ggplot(... [Read more...]

Today is Thanksgiving Day in the United States, where the nation's citizens pause to reflect on what they are thankful for. I'd like to take this opportunity to give thanks to the members of the R Core Group who developed R, and continue to donate their time to help the ... [Read more...]

In the latest update released on November 20, PowerBI has added support for R. The desktop edition of Microsoft's data visualization and reporting tool now allows you to run an R script to generate data; the resulting data frames from the script can then be used for data visualization or any ... [Read more...]

Todd W Schneider analyzed a database of 1.1 billion taxi rides in New York City from 2009-2015, and discovered some interesting insights on how New Yorkers use cabs. For example, here's a map of the drop-off locations of each ride in the database: The R code to generate this beautiful map ... [Read more...]

Two recent surveys — one based on LinkedIn skills data, and another a direct survey of data miners — show that R remains the most popular software for statistical data analysis. In a study of skills associated with LinkedIn profiles by RJmetrics (and also reported on Forbes), "data analysis" was unsurprisingly the ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from October of particular interest to R users. A video from the PASS 2015 conference in Seattle shows R running within SQL Server 2016. The preview for SQL Server 2016 includes Revolution R Enterprise (as SQL Server R Services). A way of dealing with ... [Read more...]

Betterment, the online automated investing service, uses R for modeling, analysis and reporting. In a recent blog post on the company website, data scientist Sam Swift suggests using R or Python as open data analysis platforms and goes on to reveal: Here at Betterment, we use both. We use Python ... [Read more...]

The R Consortium Infrastructure Steering Committee (chaired by Hadley Wickham) announced today the award of its first grant for an R community development project: $85,000 to Gábor Csárdi to implement the R-Hub project. As a board member of the R Consortium, I'm pleased to say this is a great ... [Read more...]

At the PASS Summit in Seattle this week, Microsoft's Jason Wilcox and Gopi Kumar demonstrated a SQL Server 2016 application that embeds R to predict what time you need to leave to catch a flight, given traffic, check-in time, and the likelihood of a flight leaving early or being delayed. The ... [Read more...]

The new SQL Server 2016 is now available as part of the Community Technical Preview program, and as presaged it embeds connectivity with the R language and the big-data statistical algorithms of Revolution R Enterprise. SQL Server 2016 includes two ways of calling R. The first is by embedding R code direcly ... [Read more...]

Thanks to Dr George Esaw, I recently learned that Ross Ihaka, co-creator of R, was featured in a full-page advertisement placed in The Economist by the University of Auckland back in April: Image credit: The Economist / University of Auckland (via George Esaw) Click on the image for a larger version, ... [Read more...]

I'm honoured to be giving the opening keynote at the Effective Applications of R Conference (EARL) Conference in Boston on November 2. My presentation will be on the business economics and opportunity of open source data science, with a focus on applications that are now possible given the convergence of big ... [Read more...]

If you work with both Matlab and R, the R.matlab package maintained by Henrik Bengtsson on CRAN helps you to connect the two environments by allowing you to read and write Matlab's MAT data file format from R (even if you don't have Matlab installed). This allows you to ... [Read more...]

Powerpoint is a powerful application for creating presentations, and allows you to include all sorts of text, pictures, animations and interactivity to create a compelling story. Most of the time you'll use the Powerpoint application to create slides, but if you want to include data and/or charts in your ... [Read more...]