IEEE Spectrum has published its 2015 list of Top Programming Languages, and R ranks in 6th place, jumping 3 places from its 2014 ranking. Here's what the IEEE has to say about the top 10 from the table above: The big five—Java, C, C++, Python, and C#—remain on top, with their ranking ... [Read more...]

The latest update to Revolution R Open, RRO 3.2.1, is now available for download from MRAN. This release upgrades to the latest R engine (3.2.1), enables package downloads via HTTPS by default, and adds new supported Linux platforms. Revolution R Open 3.2.1 includes: The latest R engine, R 3.2.1. Improvements in this release include ... [Read more...]

The KDD Cup is an annual competition to build the best predictive model from a large data set. This years' contest tasked entrants to predict the likelihood of a student dropping out from one of XuetangX's massively-online open courses, based on the student's prior activities. The competition closed on July 12, ... [Read more...]

By Torben Tvedebrink, Chair of local committee, useR! 2015 Planning After useR! 2015 in Aalborg I had some time to reflect and think back on the phase leading up to the actual conference. The story of useR! 2015 began in 2013 when Søren Højsgaard, Head of Department of Mathematical Sciences, Aalborg University, ... [Read more...]

EMC recently ran a competion to find out why John McGuinness, the legendary motorcycle racer known as the "Morecambe Missile", is outperforms the average motorcycle racer. To answer this question, EMC instrumented his bike and his suit with a number of real-time sensors. (Data collected included gear and RPM for ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from June of particular interest to R users. The R Consortium, a trade group dedicated to the support and growth of the R Community, has launched with the R Foundation, Microsoft, RStudio and others as founding members. A detailed FAQ for ... [Read more...]

In case you missed the news last week, the [R Consortium was announced](https://www.r-consortium.org/news/announcement/2015/06/linux-foundation-announces-r-consortium-support-millions-users-around). This new non-profit trade group will work with the R Foundation to support the R Community and the R Project generally. As you might expect, the announcement generated quite a ... [Read more...]

The latest worldwide R user conference has just wrapped up in Aalborg, Denmark and useR! 2015 was the best yet. A hearty round of applause to the organizers for a smoothly run, informative and fun event. To the organizers of next year's event in the Stanford, California: the bar has been ... [Read more...]

The R community has grown explosively over the past few years, both in terms of the number of R users and the number of companies who rely on R as their data science platform. To serve the needs of this rapidly growing community, and to continue the success of the ... [Read more...]

Mixed models (which include random effects, essentially parameters drawn from a random distribution) are tricky beasts. Throw non-Normal distributions into the mix for Generalized Linear Mixed Models (GLMMs), or go non-linear, and things get trickier still. It was a new field of Statistics when I was working on the Oswald ... [Read more...]

I was honoured to be the presenter at [last night's meeting of SURF](http://www.meetup.com/R-Users-Sydney/events/223092608/), the [11th largest R user group](http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/04/r-user-group-meetings-this-week-in-the-bay-area-and-around-the-world.html) worldwide. The topic of my presentation was "R at Microsoft", where I described how Microsoft has enthusiastically embraced R ... [Read more...]

For anyone who works with financial data and has access to a Bloomberg terminal, there is a new R package to interface to Bloomberg data services: RBlpapi. (If you had searched for an R connection to Bloomberg you wouldn’t have found this one — Bloomberg is happy to have software ... [Read more...]

R is now integrated with Apache Spark, the open-source cluster computing framework. The Databricks blog announced this week that yesterday's release of Spark 1.4 would include SparkR, "an R package that allows data scientists to analyze large datasets and interactively run jobs on them from the R shell". The SparkR 1.4 announcement ... [Read more...]

At last month's BUILD conference for Microsoft developers in San Francisco, R was front-and-center on the keynote stage. In the keynote, Microsoft CVP Joseph Sirosh introduced the "language of data": open source R. Sirosh encouraged the audience to learn R, saying "if there is a single language that you choose ... [Read more...]

On Monday, we compared the performance of several different ways of calculating a distance matrix in R. Now there's another method to add to the list: using GPU acceleration in R. A GPU is a dedicated, high-performance chip available on many computers today. Unlike the CPU, it's not used for ... [Read more...]

When it comes to speeding up "embarassingly parallel" computations (like for loops with many iterations), the R language offers a number of options: An R looping operator, like mapply (which runs in a single thread) A parallelized version of a looping operator, like mcmapply (which can use multiple cores) Explicit ... [Read more...]

If you download R or Revolution R Open, the R interface is pretty stark — you'll get a command prompt, and not much else. That's fine for quick, interactive calculations, but if you need to do any serious scripting or programming in R, you'll need an interactive development environment (IDE) to ... [Read more...]

R is the leading choice for Predictive Analytics / Data Mining / Data Science software according to the results of the 2015 KDnuggets Software Poll, now in its 16th year. Each of the 28,000 participants selected one or more tools they had used in the last year from a list of 93 options, and R ... [Read more...]

R is an environment for programming with data, so unless you're doing a simulation study you'll need some data to work with. If you don't have data of your own, we've made a list of open data sets you can use with R to accompany the latest release of Revolution ... [Read more...]

The latest update to Revolution R Open, RRO 3.2.0, is now available for download from MRAN. In addition to new features, this release tracks the version number of the underlying R engine version (so this is the release following RRO 8.0.3). Revolution R Open 3.2.0 includes: The latest R engine, R 3.2.0. This includes ... [Read more...]