If you often find yourself cutting-and-pasting charts or tables generated in R into PowerPoint or Keynote, you might want to take a look at Slidify. Created by R user Ramnath Vaidyanathan, Slidify is an R package that allows you to use R Markdown to define the slide content and automatically ... [Read more...]

By Joseph Rickert In a recent blog post, David Smith reported on a talk that Steve Yun and I gave at STRATA in NYC about building and benchmarking Poisson GLM models on various platforms. The results presented showed that the rxGlm function from Revolution Analytics’ RevoScaleR package running on a ... [Read more...]

RStudio has released a new package for R. Shiny allows R developers to build simple interactive Web-based interfaces for R scripts, using only R code (no JavaScript development required!). You can see some examples of Shiny in action in this blog post, and there are more details about Shiny's capabilities ... [Read more...]

As we noted last month, the new Themes feature in ggplot2 helps you customize the design of R charts to your liking. Now, R user Jeffrey Arnold has built on this feature to create standardized themes to make R graphics looks like those from major publications and other software systems. ... [Read more...]

The RHadoop project, the open-source project supported by Revolution Analytics to integrate R and Hadoop, continues to evolve. Now available is version 2 of the rmr package, which makes it possible for R programmers to write map-reduce tasks in the R language, and have them run within the Hadoop cluster. This ... [Read more...]

Last month we shared an visualization showing the changing extent of Arctic sea-ice. This visualization by the multinational Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) switches the view to the Southern pole and takes the visualization to a whole new level, by animating it in 3-D: The ... [Read more...]

Today's guest post comes from Garrett Grolemund, a software developer at RStudio — ed. I think of graphs as a type of visual summary for data. Yet I rarely see graphs used this way within visualizations. Consider tile plots. They group data into 2d bins and then summarize each group with ... [Read more...]

Today's guest post comes from Yihui Xie, author of the knitr package — ed. Hi, this is Yihui Xie, and I'm guest posting on the Revolutions blog to talk about one aspect of the knitr package: how we can integrate data analysis and reporting in R with the Web. This post ... [Read more...]

For the last decade or so, the go-to software for Bayesian statisticians has been BUGS (and later the open-source incarnation, OpenBugs, or JAGS). BUGS is used for multi-level modeling: using a specialized notation, you can define random variables of various distributions, set Bayesian priors for their parameters, and create the ... [Read more...]

People use the R language every day to create the elements of reports: tables, charts, analyses, and forecasts. But assembling all of that information into a print-ready document laid out with text can a hassle. You can cut-and-paste all of the elements into Word, but then what do you do ... [Read more...]

Last week's meeting of the Chicago area Hadoop User Group (a joint meeting the Chicago R User Group, and sponsored by Revolution Analytics) focused on crunching Big Data with R and Hadoop. Jeffrey Breen, president of Atmosphere Research Group, frequently deals with large data sets in his airline consulting work, ... [Read more...]

While most R packages on CRAN are designed to be used by an R user directly, a few packages are designed to be used by other package developers. (And some packages are so useful that they're regularly used by both camps.) When a package author publishes a package to CRAN, ... [Read more...]

The RHadoop project continues the Big Data integration of R and Hadoop, with a new update to its rmr package. Version 1.3 of rmr improves the performance of map-reduce jobs for Hadoop written in R. New features include: An optional vectorized API for efficient R programming when dealing with small records. ... [Read more...]

The June 2012 issue of the R Journal, the peer-reviewed open-journal about R packages and applications of R, is now available. This issue includes articles about: Efficiently calling C functions from R without the need for wrapper code Using clusters of Macs running Apple Xgrid for parallel distributed processing with R ... [Read more...]

John Myles White, self-described "statistics hacker" and co-author of "Machine Learning for Hackers" was interviewed recently by The Setup. In the interview, he describes his some of his go-to R packages for data science: Most of my work involves programming, so programming languages and their libraries are the bulk of ... [Read more...]

Linear Programming is a mathematical technique used to find the values of some variables (within the bounds of some defined constraints) to find the maximum value of a quantity. For example, consider this problem from the FishyOperations blog: A trading company is looking for a way to maximize profit per ... [Read more...]

R has had a maps package available since the very early days. It's great for simple geographic maps, but the political boundaries can be out of date. For more detailed maps, you can also download shape files and use the sp package to draw borders directly. But for accurate and ... [Read more...]

The latest update to open-source R, R 2.15.1, was released this morning. (You can grab sources now, and binary versions will hit the CRAN mirrors over the next couple of days.) In addition to several new features and bug fixes (including the new globalVariables function, which will be a boon to ... [Read more...]

I recently finished a long stretch of work on a particular project that required me to draw upon four R packages.  Each time I got back to my work on the project, I’d have to load the packages manually, as … Continue reading → [Read more...]

In computing, social networks are traditionally represented as graphs: a connection of nodes (people), pairs of which may be connected by edges (friend relationships). Visually, the social networks can then be represented like this: Social network analysis often amounts to calculating the statistics on a graph like this: the number ... [Read more...]