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...]

If your econometrics is a bit rusty and you're also looking to learn the R language, you can kill two birds with one stone with Introductory Econometrics using Quandl and R. The first three parts of this seven-part tutorial introduces the basics of regression analysis, while the remaining sections provide ... [Read more...]

If you're trying to predict when an event will occur (for example, a consumer buying a product) or trying to infer why events occur (what were the factors that led to a component failing?), time-to-event models are a useful framework. These models are closely related to survival analysis in life ... [Read more...]

Forbes has published an article today on the integration between Alteryx and Revolution R Enterprise, which gives business analysts the ability to drag and drop to connect data sources to R-based models, such as this one for Market Basket analysis: (Experienced R users can always drill down to see the ... [Read more...]

Boris Chen, a data scientist for the New York Times, has been running since August a weekly blog with statistical analysis of NFL players, as fodder for Fantasy Football players around the country. Here's how he describes what he does: My model pulls aggregated expert rankings from fantasypros, and I ... [Read more...]

Rexer Analytics has been conducting regular polls of data miners and analytics professionals on their software choices since 2007, and the results of the 2013 Rexer Analytics Data Miner Survey were presented at last month's Predictive Analytics World conference in Boston. Here are some highlights of the responses from the 1,039 non-vendor participants. (... [Read more...]

You already know that R is an amazingly powerful language for data analysis, but what if you're not a programmer? Or, what if you want to make the data manipulations, visualizations or statistical models you've developed in R available to business analysts, marketers, managers or other non-programming types? That's why ... [Read more...]

If you missed last week's webinar R+Hadoop - Ask Bigger (and New) Questions and Get Better, Faster Answers, the slides and replay are now available for download at that link. I've also embedded the replay video below, where you can hear Michele Chambers (Revolution Analytics) and Jairam Ranganathan (Cloudera) ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from September of particular interest to R users: Todd Schneider wrote an algorithm in R to find the "most concave" US state (it's NY), and created an animation to show how it works. Rob Hyndman (of the "forecast" package) describes how ... [Read more...]

We're thrilled to have John Wallace and Tess Nesbitt from DataSong join our Fall webinar series tomorrow, with a great presentation on time to event models. If you're trying to predict when an event will occur (for example, a consumer buying a product) or trying to infer why events occur (... [Read more...]

Tableau, the popular interactive data visualization tool, is coming out with a new 8.1 update, and it will include integration with the R language. Access to R is a feature that has been requested by Tableau users for some time, and was met with rapturous applause when it was announced at ... [Read more...]

If you haven't already registered, don't miss tomorrow's webinar presented by Cloudera's Director of Product Strategy, Jairam Ranganathan and Michele Chambers, Chief Strategy Officer at Revolution Analytics. This will be a great opportunity to learn how R and CDH (Cloudera's Hadoop distribution) work together with the forthcoming Revolution R Enterprise 7. ... [Read more...]

If you missed last week's webinar with John Kreisa from Hortonworks (hosted by Data Science Central), we described how R fits into the Modern Data Architecture. Not only can you extract and distil data in Hadoop with the open-source RHadoop project, but with the forthcoming release of Revolution R Enterprise 7 ... [Read more...]

If you were to hop into your personal aircraft, and plotted a straight line course taking off in one state and landing in the SAME state, how many other states might you fly over? On other words, what's the best state for "flyovers" of other states? Todd Schnieder from the ... [Read more...]

Statistical forecasting is a critical component of every modern business, and Rob J Hyndman, Professor of Statistics at Monash University, is an expert in the field. He's the co-author of several books on forecasting, including Forecasting: Principles and Practice, a free on-line book that provides a comprehensive introduction to forecasting ... [Read more...]

The latest update to the open source R project, R 3.0.2, is now available. This incremental update, codenamed "Frisbee Sailing", mainly fixes some minor bugs, improves the organization of the distribution, improves performance in some areas, and adds a few small features (see the NEWS file for a complete list). There's ... [Read more...]

Data Scientist Jeroen Janssens recently published a useful list of 7 data science tools that you can use from the command line. This doesn't just mean they're convenient tools for command-line junkies: it also means you can easily chain them together with data sources for offline, automated processes. Included in the ... [Read more...]

I had a fun time on Friday in a Google Hangout chat with David Pittman (IBM), Eric Kavanagh (Bloor Group) and Tom Deutsch (IBM), where we talked about how open source is changing business. The conversation covered several open source projects including R and Hadoop, and ranged from the impact ... [Read more...]