by Joseph Rickert Last month I wrote about how several R user groups were making use of GitHub and listed some sites that I thought had interesting material. A few readers were kind enough to point out sites that I had missed; so I would just like to give a ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert If you are an R user and work for an enterprise where Microsoft SQL server is important, it is extremely helpful to have easy access to SQL Server databases. Over the past year, we have run several posts on this topic including a comprehensive four part series ... [Read more...]

by Przemyslaw Biecek The first meeting of R users in Poland took place in Wroclaw in 2008. It was a one-day conference with 27 participants and 6 talks. Today, we have three large groups of R users in major Polish cities (according to meetup.com there is 640 users in SER - Warsaw, 235 in ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert A frequent question that we get here at Microsoft about MRO (Microsoft R Open) is: can be used with RStudio? The short answer is absolutely yes! In fact, more than just being compatible, MRO is the perfect complement for the RStudio environment. MRO is a downstream distribution ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert Quite a few times over the past few years I have highlighted presentations posted by R user groups on their websites and recommended these sites as a source for interesting material, but I have never thought to see what the user groups were doing on GitHub. As ... [Read more...]

by Micheleen Harris Microsoft Data Scientist As a Data Scientist, I refuse to choose between R and Python, the top contenders currently fighting for the title of top Data Science programming language. I am not going to argue about which is better or pit Python and R against each other. ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert In a previous post, I showed some elementary properties of discrete time Markov Chains could be calculated, mostly with functions from the markovchain package. In this post, I would like to show a little bit more of the functionality available in that package by fitting a Markov ... [Read more...]

by John Mount Ph.D. Data Scientist at Win-Vector LLC Let's talk about the use and benefits of parallel computation in R. IBM's Blue Gene/P massively parallel supercomputer (Wikipedia). Parallel computing is a type of computation in which many calculations are carried out simultaneously." Wikipedia quoting: Gottlieb, Allan; Almasi, ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert Over the past few months, a number of new CRAN packages have appeared that make it easier for R users to gain access to curated data. Most of these provide interfaces to a RESTful API written by the data publishers while a few just wrap the data ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert Over the last 6 years, thousands of students and faculty have downloaded Revolution R Enterprise (RRE) from Revolution Analytics for free, making it possible for them to do statistical modeling on large data sets with the same R language used by savvy statisticians and data scientists in business ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert There are number of R packages devoted to sophisticated applications of Markov chains. These include msm and SemiMarkov for fitting multistate models to panel data, mstate for survival analysis applications, TPmsm for estimating transition probabilities for 3-state progressive disease models, heemod for applying Markov models to health ... [Read more...]

By Virgilio Gómez Rubio, Spanish R Users Organizing Committee As every autumn since 2009, Spanish R users gathered at their annual meeting. It is organised by Spanish R users group ‘Comunidad R-Hispano’and took place in 5-6 November in the historic city of Salamanca. The 7th Meeting of Spanish R ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert The following map of all of the R user groups listed in Microsoft's Local R User Group Directory is good way to visualize the R world as we rocket into 2016. As a member of the useR!2016 planning committee, foremost in my mind right now is that in ... [Read more...]

by Seth Mottaghinejad, Data Scientist at Microsoft R and big data There are many R packages dedicated to letting users (or useRs if you prefer) deal with big data in R. (We will intentionally avoid using proper case for 'big data', because (1) the term has been somewhat hackneyed, and (2) for ... [Read more...]

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by Edward Ma and Vishrut Gupta (Hewlett Packard Enterprise) A few weeks ago, we revealed ddR (Distributed Data-structures in R), an exciting new project started by R-Core, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and others that provides a fresh new set of computational primitives for distributed and parallel computing in R. The package ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert If there is anything that experienced machine learning practitioners are likely to agree on, it would be the importance of careful and thoughtful feature engineering. The judicious selection of which predictor variables to include in a model often has a more beneficial effect on overall classifier performance ... [Read more...]

by Bob Horton Sr. Data Scientist at Microsoft Common table expressions (CTEs, or “WITH clauses”) are a syntactic feature in SQL that makes it easier to write and use subqueries. They act as views or temporary tables that are only available during the lifetime of a single query. A more ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert 2015 has been a good year for R user groups, both in terms of activity and the number of new groups founded. The plot below which runs 12/30/2012 through the week beginning with Monday 11/23/2015 shows that the number of weekly meeting continues to drift up to the right. You ... [Read more...]

by Michael Helbraun The software business includes travel, and that means hotels. The news that Marriott was acquiring Starwood was of particular interest to me – especially since more than 75% of my 95 nights so far this year on the road have been spent with one of those two companies. While other ... [Read more...]