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...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from September of particular interest to R users. A tutorial on using R with Jupyter Notebooks and how to control the size of R graphics therein. A new version of Revolution R Open is available, featuring multi-threaded computing for R 3.2.2. One ... [Read more...]

For more than six years, the New York Times has been using the R language to develop and implement much of the fantastic data journalism on the website and in the newspaper. A few months ago graphics editor Amanda Cox was interviewed for the Data Stories podcast, where she described ... [Read more...]

Hadley Wickham, RStudio's Chief Scientist and prolific author of R books and packages, conducted an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session on Reddit this past Monday. The session was tremendously popular, generating more than 500 questions/comments and promoting the AMA to the front page of Reddit. If you're not familiar with ... [Read more...]

If you've developed a useful function in R (say, a function to make a forecast or prediction from a statistical model), you may want to call that function from an application other than R. For example, you might want to display the forecast (calculated in R) as part of a ... [Read more...]

The RHadoop packages make it easy to connect R to Hadoop data (rhdfs), and write map-reduce operations in the R language (rmr2) to process that data using the power of the nodes in a Hadoop cluster. But getting the Hadoop cluster configured, with R and all the necessary packages installed ... [Read more...]

The Effective Applications of R (EARL) Conference (held last week in London) is well-named. At the event I saw many examples of R being used to solve real-world industry problems with advanced statistics and data visualization. Here are just a few examples: AstraZeneca, the pharmaceutical company, uses R to design ... [Read more...]

Microsoft is sponsoring another free MOOC starting on September 24: Data Science and Machine Learning Essentials. This course provides a five-week introduction to machine learning and data science concepts, including the open-source programming tools for data science: R and Python. (Read more about the course in this post on TechNet.) This ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from August of particular interest to R users. Creating interactive time series charts of financial data in R. Many R books have been translated into Chinese. A tutorial on visualizing current-events geographic data with choropleths. Revolution R Enterprise 7.4.1 is now available ... [Read more...]

BlueSky Statistics is a new GUI-driven statistical data analysis tool for Windows. It provides a series of dialogs to import and manipluate data, and to perform statistical analysis and visualization tasks. (Think: more like SPSS than RStudio.) The underlying operations are implemented using R code, which you can inspect and ... [Read more...]

Revolution R Open, the enhanced open source R distribution from Revolution Analytics and Microsoft, is now available for download. This update brings multi-threaded performance to the latest update to the R engine from the R Core Group, which includes several improvements and bug fixes. Significant amongst these is default support ... [Read more...]

Cortana Analytics Suite is Microsoft's cloud-based big data and advanced analytics suite. It includes a complete set of all the services need to build advanced analytics applications: from data ingestion and management, data warehousing, advanced analytics, data visualization and solution frameworks. You can use Cortana Analytics to build applications using ... [Read more...]

Zillow, the leading real estate and rental marketplace in the USA, uses R to estimate housing values. Zillow's signature product is the Zestimate, their estimated market value for individual homes, and it's calculated using R in a parallel batch job for 100 million homes nationwide. The process is described in this ... [Read more...]

If you've thought about learning the R language but didn't know how to start, there's a new, free course on edX that starts you from the R basics and lets you learn R by trying R as you go. Presented by DataCamp and Microsoft, the course starts from the very ... [Read more...]

Everyone needs to be vigilant about security on the Web today. One particular threat — the man-in-the-middle attack — is a risk anytime you are communicating over the Internet, and an attacker has access to the network between the two endpoints. This is a possibility whenever you are using the Web over ... [Read more...]

This just in from the R Core Team: R 3.2.2 has been released. With this update, data accessed over the Web -- including files downloaded using download.file via URLS, and packages installed install.packages -- will be transmitted using the secure HTTPS protocol. (This has always been an option with ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from July of particular interest to R users. An alternative to stacked bar charts with the streamgraphs package. Joseph Rickert shares his process for creating the monthly new and updated packages "spotlight" feature on MRAN. Using R to analyze data from ... [Read more...]

There's a new podcast in town, and it's focused on R. Four members of the R community (Oliver Keyes, Wikimedia Foundation; Jasmine Dumas. DePaul University; Ted Hart, Silcon Valley "fruit vendor"; and Mikhail Popov, Wikimedia Foundation) have banded together to produce R Talk, a podcast about "the R Programming language, ... [Read more...]