In a live webinar today hosted by Alteryx, five industry experts shared 14 analytics predictions for 2014. The panel included Paul Ross (Alteryx), Charles Zedlewski (Cloudera), Rick Schultz (Alteryx), Ellie Fields (Tableau) and Michele Chambers (Revolution Analytics). Their predictions were: Analysts will matter more than data scientists R will replace legacy SAS ... [Read more...]

R can do a lot of really amazing things, but to use just about any of R's many features you need to first import your data and get it into the appropriate shape. For R beginners, this "data wrangling" task can be daunting. Fortunately, ComputerWorld's Sharon Machlis has created an ... [Read more...]

__ require(devtools) __ install_github("cowsay","SChamberlain") __ require(cowsay) __ say("Happy Thanksgiving!",by="chicken") ----- Happy Thanksgiving! ------ \ \ _ _/ } `__' \ `| \ | /'-. .-. \' ';`--' .' \'. `'-./ '.`-..-;` `;-..' _| _| /` /` (With thanks for Scott Chamberlain for the cowsay package.) For those in the US and everyone who celebrates, Happy ... [Read more...]

It's pretty easy (and free!) to download R and install it on your own PC, Mac or Linux machine, but if you don't have one of those or simply aren't ready to commit to installing it, you can now try it out online. R-Fiddle (from DataMind) provides an easy-to-use interactive ... [Read more...]

It's no coincidence that while the usage of the R language is skyrocketing (as shown in the recent Rexer Analytics and KDNuggets polls), the growth in data scientist jobs is also skyrocketing. R is the lingua franca of data science, and as the pervasive statistical software in the academic sector, ... [Read more...]

If you learned statistics using Stata software but have an interest in learning the R language, it's worth checking out R~Stata: Notes on Exporing Data by Princeton's Oscar Torres-Reyna. D-Lab's Laura Nelson provides an overview, but in short it's a collection of 30 PDF slides that introduces R for Stata ... [Read more...]

Iterators — object-oriented programming constructs that act as a pointer in an ordered sequence — are familiar to programmers of languages like Python, but are not a standard part of the R language. Nonetheless, by installing the iterators package (an open-source contribution by Revolution Analytics) you can create and manipulate iterator objects ... [Read more...]

Last month I joined Gregory Piatetsky (KDnuggets editor) for a webinar presentation Data Science: Not Just for Big Data, hosted by Kalido. In my portion of the prentation (you can see my slides below), I wanted to react to the Big Data focus which is so much a part of ... [Read more...]

R is designed as an in-memory application: all of the data you work with must be hosted in the RAM of the machine you're running R on. This optimizes performance and flexibility, but does place contraints on the size of data you're working with (since it must all work in ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from October of particular interest to R users: Joe Rickert recounts the R presence at the Strata + Hadoop World conference, including slides from the R and Hadoop tutorial. Hadley Wickham's favorite tools, gadgets and software (including of course R). Revolution R ... [Read more...]

Prof. Ripley today announced on the r-devel mailing list that CRAN now has it's 5000th R package: Package 'quint' brought the number of packages on CRAN (for all platforms: some are Windows-only or non-Windows only) to 5000 a few minutes ago: see http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/index.html. That's ... [Read more...]

The new book Analyzing Baseball Data with R by Max Marchi and Jim Albert is now available, and the authors have also launched a companion blog to share some of the analyses from the book. For example, they used the Lahman package in R to look at the strikeout rate ... [Read more...]

In case you missed yesterday's webinar, the slides and replay are now available for Introducing Revolution R Enterprise 7: The Big Data Big Analytics Platform. I've embedded the slides below — if you're already familiar with Revolution R Enterprise the new features start at Slide 21. You can also download the slides or ... [Read more...]

We're back from NYC after a very busy Strata + Hadoop World 2013 conference. Many thanks to all the friendly folks who dropped by the Revolution Analytics booth, attended Joe and Antonio's R and Hadoop tutorial, or simply came up to say hello during the event. It was a jam-packed conference, literally ... [Read more...]

Revolution R Enterprise 7 is a major update to Revolution Analytics' flagship predictive analytics software. Not only does it include the latest release of Open Source R (providing compatability with more than 6,000 user-contributed packages), it also adds in-Hadoop and in-database predictive modeling with big data, new statistical capabilities, and drag-and-drop workflow ... [Read more...]

You know Hadley Wickham as the inventor of the ggplot2 visualization phenomenon, the creator of time-saving R packages like plyr and lubridate, and the Chief Scientist at RStudio. But do you know what laptop Hadley uses, what software he uses (besides, R, of course), or his favourite kitchen appliance? Find ... [Read more...]

I'm in New York City for the Strata + Hadoop World conference, and last night I got the chance to stop by theCUBE for an live interview about Revolution R Enterprise 7. You can watch the full interview below, or click the links on the topics to skip ahead. Many thanks to ... [Read more...]

We're very excited to formally announce that Revolution R Enterprise 7 is here! This release includes the latest release of Open Source R (R 3.0.2). It brings R and the massively-parallel R functions from Revolution Analytics to Cloudera and Hortonworks in-Hadoop, and in-database on Teradata. It also brings a new drag-and-drop user ... [Read more...]

To take a spreadsheet beyond what it's designed for — data presentation, summarization and simple calculations — into the world of complex data analysis can be an alluring prospect. But it can also be dangerous: consider these examples of spreadsheet errors that led to monumental financial losses, mistaken government policies, and even ... [Read more...]

The .Rprofile file is a great way to customize your R session every time you start it up. You can use it to change R's defaults, define handy command-line functions, automatically load your favourite packages — anything you like! The Getting Genetics Blog has a nice example .Rprofile file to give ... [Read more...]