In case you missed them, here are some articles from October of particular interest to R users. R hits a new milestone with 6,000 CRAN packages, and R 3.1.2 released. Revolution Analytics announces Revolution R Open, a supported and enhanced downstream distribution of R. (Learn more at the webinar on Wednesday November 12.) ... [Read more...]

We recently shared some benchmarks for Revolution R Open on the Windows platform, which showed significant improvements compared to R downloaded from CRAN. Those performance gains mainly come from multi-threading: Revolution R Open is linked to the Intel Math Kernel Library, which uses all available cores (rather than just one ... [Read more...]

On Wednesday next week, I'll be presenting a live webinar to introduce Revolution R Open and several other open source projects from Revolution Analytics. In the webinar I'll describe: The enhancements included in Revolution R Open The Reproducible R Toolkit and the checkpoint package How to call R from other ... [Read more...]

The key to making data science successful is making sure you can deploy the machine learning code that data scientists create into applications that rely on the results of the analysis. Microsoft has tackled this problem with Azure ML: machine learning in the cloud. This short video neatly summarizes the ... [Read more...]

The latest update to the world's most popular statistical data analysis software is now available. R 3.1.2 (codename: "Pumpkin Helmet") makes a number of minor improvements and bug fixes to the R language engine. You can see the complete list of changes here, which include improvements for the log-Normal distribution function, ... [Read more...]

If you ever find you need to embed the results of R functions — data, charts, or even a single calculation — into other applications, then you might want to take a look at DeployR Open. DeployR Open is an open-source server-based framework for R, that makes it easy to call out ... [Read more...]

How do you summarize fashion? For New York Fashion Week, the New York Times used the idea of "Fashion Fingerprints", distilling a designer's collections into small fragments highlighting the palette. Here's what Marc Jacobs' current collection looks like: Click through for an interactive version where you can explore each design, ... [Read more...]

If you haven't heard the buzz about Docker but you often need to spin up Linux-based VM's for testing, simulations, etc. then you should check it out. In short, Docker rocks: we use it for testing our Linux-based distros of Revolution R Open. If you want to use R and ... [Read more...]

Many R scripts depend on CRAN packages, and most CRAN packages in turn depend on other CRAN packages. If you install an R package, you'll also be installing its dependencies to make it work, and possibly other packages as well to enable its full functionality. My colleague Andrie posted some ... [Read more...]

My second-favourite keynote from yesterday's Strata Hadoop World conference was this one, from Pinterest's John Rauser. To many people (especially in the Big Data world), Statistics is a series of complex equations, but a just a little intuition goes a long way to really understanding data. John illustrates this wonderfully ... [Read more...]

For the past 7 years, Revolution Analytics has been the leading provider of R-based software and services to companies around the globe. Today, we're excited to announce a new, enhanced R distribution for everyone: Revolution R Open. Revolution R Open is a downstream distribution of R from the R Foundation for ... [Read more...]

The Fantasy Football Analytics blog shares these 14 reasons why R is better than Excel for data analysis: More powerful data manipulation capabilities Easier automation Faster computation It reads any type of data Easier project organization It supports larger data sets Reproducibility (important for detecting errors) Easier to find and fix ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from September of particular interest to R users. Norm Matloff argues that T-tests shouldn't be part of the Statistics curriculum and questions the "star system" for p-values in R. A nice video introduction to the dplyr package and the %__% operator, presented ... [Read more...]

As a computer scientist, RStudio's Joe Cheng has some great insights into the R language and how it compares with other programming language. In the interview with DataScience.LA below, he notes that while R is often thought about as a domain-specific language (or DSL), the combination of a functional ... [Read more...]

The New York Times published an article of interest to statisticians the other day: "The Odds, Continually Updated". Surprisingly for a general-audience newspaper, this article goes into the the distinctions between Bayesian and frequentist statistics, and does so in a very approachable way. Here's an excerpt: The essence of the ... [Read more...]

Hadley Wickham's dplyr package is a great toolkit for getting data ready for analysis in R. If you haven't yet taken the plunge to using dplyr, Kevin Markham has put together a great hands-on video tutorial for his Data School blog, which you can see below. The video covers the ... [Read more...]

The militarization of local police departments here in the US has been much in the news lately, and the New York Times published in June an in-depth article on how materiel from wars has ended up in the hands of US counties. Besides the traditional reporting it's a fantastic piece ... [Read more...]

In discussion with several data scientists, Will Stanton (a data scientist with Return Path) learned that a common concern is: what software should I be using? There are many options out there, but what is the best platform to be an effective "data hacker"? Will recommends using a technology stack ... [Read more...]

You're probably familiar with the classic Travelling Salesman problem: given (say) 20 cities, what is shortest route you can take that passes through all 20 cities and returns to the starting point? It's a difficult problem to solve, because you need to try all possible routes to find the minimum, and there ... [Read more...]

A quick heads up that if you'd like to get a great introduction to doing data science with the R language, Joe Rickert will be giving a free webinar next Thursday, September 25: Data Science with R. Regular readers of the blog will be familiar with Joe's posts on this topic. ... [Read more...]