Over at the Hortonworks blog, I've shared some resources for getting started with Data Science and R. And if you'd like to learn more about how Hadoop and R fit into the modern data artchitecture, I'll be participating in a joint webinar with Hortonworks' John Kreisa. If you'd like to ... [Read more...]

To mark Talk Like a Pirate Day, Bob Rudis uses R to animate a map of the cumulative real-world pirate attacks since 1978: Looks like the Carribean and the West Indes, traditional pirate haunts, are still active. But the real hot-spot in modern times is Africa. Find the R code behind ... [Read more...]

Arrr, Mateys! Today be "Talk Like a Pirate Day", t' unofficial day o' R users everywhere. (Rrrrr!) T' celebrate this swashbucklin' day, Revolution Analytics has a bunch o' pirate bandanas, eaypatches and "I love R" T-shirts t' give away t' t' best pirate pictures posted t' t' #RPirate2013 hashtag on ... [Read more...]

Today, Teradata announced the new Teradata Database 14.10 and with it some exciting news for R programmers: the first next-generation in-database R analytics that are fully parallel and scalable. In conjunction with Revolution R Enterprise, R users will soon be able to use the power of the Teradata Database as a ... [Read more...]

The most recent edition of the Revolution Newsletter is now available. In case you missed it, the news section is below, and you can read the full September edition (with highlights from this blog and community events) online. You can subscribe to the Revolution Newsletter to get it monthly via ... [Read more...]

Datanami interviews Revolution Analytics' Bill Jacobs about the upcoming Revolution R Enterprise 7, which will be available later this year. A key feature of this release is that that the big-data predictive analytics R functions in the ScaleR package will run on data situated in a Hadoop cluster, and use the ... [Read more...]

During the 2013 JSM (Joint Statistics Meetings) Conference in Montreal, Revolution Analytics conducted a survey of attendees from August 5 to August 8. The 865 respondents gave their opinions on the privacy and ethics related to data collection, and on their familiarity with statistical software used for the analysis of such data. Out of ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from August of particular interest to R users: A tutorial on parallel programming with the foreach, doMC and doSNOW packages. Joe Rickert reviews R's capabilities for linear algebra, sparse matrices and big matrices. How R is disrupting the insurance industry with ... [Read more...]

The massively-online open course (MOOC) platform Coursera has already delivered two essential free courses for anyone who wants to learn the R language. Computing for Data Analysis, presented by Roger Peng, covers the basics of R programming. The follow-up course Data Analysis, presented by Jeff Leek, covers statistical modeling and ... [Read more...]

One of the practical challenges of Bayesian statistics is being able to deal with all of the complex probability distributions involved. You begin with the likelihood function of interest, but once you combine it with the prior distributions of all the parameters, you end up with a complex posterior distribution ... [Read more...]

R has been featured in a couple of recent articles in the tech press. Last month, Data Informed's feature article 5 Key Considerations When Choosing Open Source Statistics Software suggested R for its analytics capabilities: Certainly, the statistical language R, for instance, is these days hugely popular—not least because it’... [Read more...]

Last week, Revolution Analytics' US Chief Scientist Mario Inchiosa gave a presentation on high-performance predictive analytics in R and Hadoop, showing how Revolution R Enterprise 7 will bring the high-performance predictable algorithms of ScaleR to run on Cloudera and Hortonworks Hadoop clusters, while retaining the same easy-to-use interface from the R ... [Read more...]

The best way to learn any software is to use it, and if you're new to Hadoop and want to try using Hadoop with R the process of setting up your own Hadoop cluster can be daunting (to say the least). But if learning is the goal, the key is ... [Read more...]

KDDNuggets has completed its annual poll of top languages for analytics, data mining and data science, and just as in the prior two years the R language is ranked the most popular. R is used by almost 61% of respondents: R's usage grew year over year as well, up 16% compared to ... [Read more...]

Exegetic Analytics extols the wonders of foreach package for iterative operations that go beyond the standard "for" loop in R. For example, here's a neat (if not optimally efficient) construct using filters to calculate the primes less than 100: foreach(n = 1:100, .combine = c) %:% when (isPrime(n)) %do% n The open-source team ... [Read more...]

Revolution Analytics has teamed up with Cloudera to bring the scalable data manipulation and statistical modeling algorithms of Revolution R Enteprise to the massively-parallel computing environments of CDH3 and CDH4 Hadoop clusters. As ZDNet reports: Specifically, the upcoming version 7.0 of the Revolution R Enterpise distribution and its ScaleR algorithms will ... [Read more...]

We're proud that Revolution R Enterprise recently received the award for Top Innovator for Data Visualization from DataWeek. The R language has long been at the forefront of data visualization, and is the graphical engine behind many of the unique data visualizations you often see on the web and in ... [Read more...]

This coming Tuesday, August 27, our US Chief Scientist Mario Inchosa will reveal some details of the forthcoming in-Hadoop predictive analytics capabilities of Revolution R Enterprise 7, due for release later this year. Here's the abtract of his webinar, High Performance Predictive Analytics in R and Hadoop: Hadoop is rapidly being adopted ... [Read more...]

Earlier this month, we looked at the trends in the job prospects for data analysts with expertise in R and SAS, by looking at the number of job postings that mention each software package. Because R's single-letter name makes it hard to search for, and because SAS is used for ... [Read more...]

With the FMS Symphony by csv soundsystem you can listen to the Global Financial Crisis as you watch interest rates plunge while the Treasury floods the market with emergency funds. The source data for the chart and music comes from daily emails (like this one) sent by the US Treasury ... [Read more...]