To play in a World Cup national soccer team, a player must be a citizen of that country. But most World Cup players don't regularly play in the nation of their World Cup team. Some hold dual citizenship; others simply play for a league team in a foreign country where ... [Read more...]

Earlier this month, the results of the 15th annual KDnuggets Software Poll were released and R's popularity continues to grow. 38.5% of respondents reporting using open source R in the last 12 months, up from 37.4% in 2013. R was second only to RapidMiner in popularity, which was used by 44.2% of respondents to this ... [Read more...]

Ever since the days of digital film processing, cinematographers have had free rein to recolor their shots in any way they like, without the hassle of chemical developing systems from the old film days. The Coen Brothers' Oh Brother Where Art Thou was the first Hollywood film to use this ... [Read more...]

To follow on from this post, here are a couple more companies using R: Uber, the ride-share company, uses R for statistical analysis. According to econometric analysis of DUI incidents (driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs) in Seattle, the introduction of the Uber service corresponded with a 10% decrease ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from May of particular interest to R users: Karl Broman's hipsteR guide lists some new(ish) features of R that early adopters may have missed. Joseph Rickert reviews the R/Finance 2014 conference and summarizes the R packages presented there. Plus, a ... [Read more...]

"A growing body of evidence that indicates that the most meaningful way to access predictive analytics and enhance the reputation of Data Science is through open source analytics, which greatly hinges upon the free open source programming language R", according to Dataversity in the recent article "The Relevance of Open ... [Read more...]

It was a great honour to be able to present to the China R Users Conference in Beijing last month, and share various applications of R that I've encountered recently. I was really invigorated by the enthusiasm of the many R users at the conference, and everyone was very warm ... [Read more...]

Check out this tweet: Just found out that @rdpeng @jtleek @bcaffo have enrolled 1,000,000 students in statistics classes on @coursera in last 2 years. — Simply Statistics (@simplystats) May 30, 2014 Those courses include Roger Peng's Computing for Data Analysis and Jeff Leek's "Data Analysis", and they all use the R language. That means more ... [Read more...]

The useR! 2014 conference promises to be the biggest yet, with more than 500 registrations already. But there's room for plenty more R users! Check out the update from the organizing committer below, and if you haven't already done so, register for the conference at the useR! 2014 website. We are exactly one ... [Read more...]

If you learned R in its early days (say, the early 2000's or even the late 1990's) you may still be using some — ahem — old-fashioned ways to accomplish some tasks better served by newer functions and packages. To help those of us who have may missed some of R's more ... [Read more...]

Many companies are considering switching from SAS to R for statistical data analysis, and may be wondering how R compares in performance and data size scalability to the legacy SAS systems (base SAS and SAS/Stat) they are currently using. Performance and scalability for R is exactly what Revolution R ... [Read more...]

If you've ever played online multiplayer games like Halo on the Xbox console, you'll know that being matched up with the right teammates and opponents is a critical part of the experience. Getting matched with an opponent that's way above your skill level isn't just demoralizing for you; it's also ... [Read more...]

The official T-shirt for the useR! 2014 R user conference (to be held June 30 - July 3 at UCLA) will be the result of open source contributions and reproducible research. The organizers of the conference are soliciting designs for the official T-shirt — but there's a catch. The image on the front of ... [Read more...]

If you're in the Philadelphia area and want to hack on some data with other R users this evening, come to the IntegriChain/Revolution Analytics Meetup at Drexel University. There will be an short lecture to introduce the problem, followed by a hacking session (virtual machines with Revolution R software ... [Read more...]

Facebook is a company that deals with a lot of data — more than 500 terabytes a day — and R is widely used at Facebook to visualize and analyze that data. Applications of R at Facebook include user behaviour, content trends, human resources and even graphics for the IPO prospectus. Now, four ... [Read more...]

Ever wondered where on your body is the most painful place to be stung by a bee? Me either, but Michael Smith from Cornell's Department of Neurobiology and Behavior was eager enough to find out that he stung himself 25 to find out which location was the most painful. (Thanks BR ... [Read more...]

Looking for a fun and useful intro to R for first-timers, with bonus cat pictures? Look no further than R for Cats, from Scott Chamberlain of ROpenSci. In addition to very helpful tips on R syntax, data structures, and an excellent list of dos and don'ts, it also shows you ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from April of particular interest to R users: Registration is now open for the useR! 2014 R conference in Los Angeles. A new Kaggle competition challenges R users to predict which shoppers will become repeat buyers. Data on R usage around the ... [Read more...]

In a new article for FastCoLabs, journalist Tina Amirtha has published a follow-up article to last month's piece on R's impact on open science. In her latest article, the focus is on how R is used at companies and displacing legacy statistics software like SAS: SAS is no match for ... [Read more...]

For more than 7 years, Revolution Analytics has provided expert technical support to users of the R language, as part of their annual subscription to Revolution R Enterprise (RRE). Now, all users of open source R can get the same expert technical support with our new AdviseR program, for just $795 per ... [Read more...]