Analyst firm RedMonk periodically publishes rankings of the Top 20 programming languages, as measured by activity on StackOverflow and number of repositories on GitHub. In their most recent ranking (January 2014), R is ranked #15 amongst all programming languages. An impressive ranking for a domain-specific language; the top 3 were the general-purpose languages Java, ... [Read more...]

If you're new to the R language but keen to get started with linear modeling or logistic regression in the language, take a look at this "Introduction to R" PDF, by Princeton's Germán Rodríguez. (There's also a browsable HTML version.) In a crisp 35 pages it begins by taking ... [Read more...]

Who will win the SuperBowl this Sunday: Seattle or Denver? As pundits around the country weigh in with their predictions, you might want to check out the analysis from the New York Times' 4th Down Bot, which compares the coaches' calls on fourth down plays with what historical statistics and ... [Read more...]

"R has had a revolutionary effect on the way statistics are communicated." So says John Chambers: one of the members of the R-core team overseeing R; and co-inventor of the S language. In this interview with Trevor Hastie (his co-author on Statistical Models in S), John Chambers recounts his involvement ... [Read more...]

Want to see how you can use a drag-and-drop user interface to run and share R code? Check out our webinar next Wednesday January 29 (hosted by Alteryx and Revolution Analytics): Creating Value That Scales with Revolution Analytics & Alteryx. In the webinar, Dan Putler (Alteryx's Data Artisan in Residence) will demonstrate ... [Read more...]

RStudio's Hadley Wickham has just introduced a new package for filtering, selecting, restructuring and aggregating tabular data in R: the dplyr package. It's similar in concept to Hadley's original plyr package from 2009, but with several key improvements: It works exclusively with data in R data frames; It can process data ... [Read more...]

Choropleth maps are a popular way of representing spatial or geographic data, where a statistic of interest (say, income, voting results or crime rate) are color-coded by region. R includes all of the necessary tools for creating choropleth maps, but Trulia's Ari Lamstein has made the process even easier with ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from December of particular interest to R users: A ComputerWorld tutorial on basic data processing with R. Prediction: R will replace legacy SAS solutions and go mainstream. A chart of the growth of R user groups and local R meetings. I ... [Read more...]

O'Reilly has just published the results of the Data Scientist Salary Survey, based on data collected from attendees of the O'Reilly Strata conferences in 2012 and 2013. There were some interesting results from the salary portion of the survey: data scientists at early-stage startups earned a median salary of US$130,000 data scientists ... [Read more...]

Our crack-shot R trainer Luba Gloukhov generated a spirited (pun intended!) discussion from her post K-means Clustering 86 Single Malt Scotch Whiskies, with mentions of her analysis at FlowingData and Reddit amongst others. Other bloggers took a look at the data too, notably Christopher Ingraham who created this beautiful infographic of ... [Read more...]

We had a marvellous series of guest posts here on the blog over the past few weeks. I'd like to give a special thanks to all of our guest bloggers for contributing, with special thanks to Joe Rickert for stepping in as our acting editor for the past 3 weeks. If ... [Read more...]

If, like me, you struggled to understand the Fourier Transformation when you first learned about it, this succinct one-sentence colour-coded explanation from Stuart Riffle probably comes several years too late: Stuart provides a more detailed explanation here. This is the formula for the Discrete Formula Transform, which converts sampled signals (... [Read more...]

It's a brand new year, and the Revolutions blog is now three weeks into its sixth year. Hard to believe that a little over five years ago this was the only R-related blog; now there are more than 450 and the R project and the R community continue to thrive and ... [Read more...]

As we close out the year, we asked a few members of the Revolution Analytics team to make a few predictions about big data analytics, data science and R for 2014. Here's what they came up with (including a few from yours truly). Michele Chambers, Chief Strategy Officer and VP Product ... [Read more...]

I'm heading out on vacation shortly but don't worry: we have a fantastic series of guest bloggers contributing to the Revolution blog for the next 3 weeks. We'll have posts from the Revolution Analytics development team, contributions from prominent R community members, and industry experts. And I'll still pop in from ... [Read more...]

My Twitter account @revodavid has, of this writing, 8828 followers. But is that below or above average amongst active Twitter accounts? Since Twitter doesn't publish statistics of follower counts, I've really had little idea. Until now, that is, because Jon Bruner has done some independent research to estimate the distribution of ... [Read more...]

In an ZDNet article published this morning, Revolution Analytics CTO Greg Todd surveys the landscape for IT archietcture and tools to bring the insights of data scientists to business decision makers: In the changing world of technology, information, and analytics, the ability to leverage the latest techniques and tools has ... [Read more...]

Now that the limited availability period is complete, we're pleased to announce that Revolution R Enterprise 7 is now generally available for all customers on the following platforms (see the detailed list of supported platforms): Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux workstations Windows, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux servers ... [Read more...]

The program for next year's useR! conference in Los Angeles is shaping up nicely, with confirmed speakers including John Chambers (from the R Core Group), David Diez (OpenIntro), Dirk Eddelbuettel (Rcpp, Debian), Jan de Leeuw (Journal of Statistical Software), Martin Mächler (R Core, R Foundation) and Karline Soetaert (author ... [Read more...]

Tomorrow at 11AM Pacific Time, Revolution Analytics' Chief Scientist Mario Inchiosa will present a live webinar on Scalable Cross-Platform R-Based Predictive Analytics. Here's the abstract: In this webinar we will take a quick tour through an end-to-end predictive analytics session. We will start by exploring our data with summaries and ... [Read more...]