New media sites like Buzzfeed and Upworthy have mastered the art of "clickbait": headlines and content designed to drive as much traffic as possible to their sites. One technique is to use coy headlines like "If you take a puppy video break today, make sure this is the dog video ... [Read more...]

The site githut.info provides quarterly statistics on programming language activity on GitHub, by number of repositories, pushes, forks etc. Ranked by number of active repositories on GitHub, R is the 12th most popular programming language as of Q4 2014. JavaScript, Java and Python appear as the top 3 in the same ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from January of particular interest to R users. Slides on reproducible data analysis with Revolution R Open and the checkpoint package. A review of a recent Bay Area R User Group meetup, featuring Hadley Wickham, Ryan Hafen and Nick Elprin. In ... [Read more...]

Sentiment analysis has been widely used to infer the mood of customers in emails, tweets and other short communications. The base assumption is that the sentiment is a fixed value: the email is either angry or happy; positive or negative. But in longer writings like a novel, we naturally expect ... [Read more...]

Hadley Wickham's testthat package has been a boon for R package authors, making it easy to write tests to verify that your code is working directly, and alerting you when you make changes to your code that inadvertently breaks things. For the RHadoop project, though, developer Antonio Piccolboni needed a ... [Read more...]

The following image by Mathieu Rajerison has been doing the rounds of French media recently. It shows the streets of Paris, color-coded by their compass direction. It's been featured in an article in Telerama magazine, and even on French TV Channel LCI (skip ahead to 8:20 in the linked video. which ... [Read more...]

Thanks to everyone at the Chicago R User Group for giving me such a warm welcome for my presentation last night. In my talk, I gave an introduction to Revolution R Open, with a focus on how the checkpoint package makes sharing R code in a reproducible way easy: If ... [Read more...]

In a recent article at opensource.com, I offer up some reasons why now is the time to learn R: data scientists are in high demand, R is the natural language for data scientists, and companies around the world are using R (and hiring R programmers) to make sense of ... [Read more...]

There was a lot of news coverage on Friday and over the weekend about the news that Microsoft will acquire Revolution Analytics. Here are some links to just a few of the articles published. Wired: Microsoft is "heavily embracing the R programming language"; "the move deepens Microsof's investments in open ... [Read more...]

From the "statistician humour" department, today's xkcd cartoon will ring a bell for anyone who's ever published (or read!) a scientific article including a P-value for a statistical test: If finding P-value excuses is a common activity for you (and let's hope not!) then R has you covered with the ... [Read more...]

by David Smith, Chief Community Officer On behalf of the entire Revolution Analytics team I am excited to announce that Revolution Analytics is joining forces with Microsoft to bring R to even more enterprises. Microsoft announced today that it will acquire Revolution Analytics. Now, Microsoft might seem like a strange ... [Read more...]

Inspired by Tufte's classic visualization of New York City weather in 2013, Alex Bresler used the R language to update the chart for 2014: (Click the image to view the zoomable SVG version.) The R code to create the plot is available on GitHub, and is easily adapted to display data for ... [Read more...]

Harvard University is offering a free 5-week on-line course on Statistics and R for the Life Sciences on the edX platform. The course promises you will learn the basics of statistical inference and the basics of using R scripts to conduct reproducible research. You'll just need a backround in basic ... [Read more...]

It's been more than four years since I wrote the white paper R is Hot with the goal of introducing R to companies who need modern and flexible data analysis software. It's still the most-downloaded whitepaper on the Revolution Analytics website. But a lot has changed in the past four ... [Read more...]

The team at RStudio have just released an update to the immensely useful dplyr package, making it even more powerful for manipulating data frame data in R. The new 0.4.0 version adds new "verbs" to the syntax for mutating joins (left join, right join, etc.), filtering joins, and set operations (intersection ... [Read more...]

Bioconductor is a project to develop and curate a collection of R packages used for analysis of genetic data (specifically, analysis and comprehension of high-throughput genomic data). With the wealth of genetic data on humans and animals now available, Bioconductor is widely used in medical research to understand how genes ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from November of particular interest to R users. R was featured in recent articles in Nature News and Mashable. A recap of the 6th Spanish R Users Conference. R was the recipient of a 2014 "Bossie" award for best open-source big data ... [Read more...]

For Twitter, finding anomalies — sudden spikes or dips — in a time series is important to keep the microblogging service running smoothly. A sudden spike in shared photos may signify an "trending" event, whereas a sudden dip in posts might represent a failure in one of the back-end services that needs ... [Read more...]

Here's a neat demo from Yihui Xie: you can talk to this R graph and customize it with voice commands. You'll need to click through the link to start the demo in a new window, and you'll need to be using Chrome and allow access to your microphone. (If you ... [Read more...]

Happy New Year everyone! Another year has come and gone, and this blog has just entered its seventh year of publication. (Once again, I missed the anniversary back on December 9.) Thanks to everyone who has supported this blog over the past 6 years by reading, sharing and commenting on our posts. ... [Read more...]