In a tongue-in-cheek post at the Information Management blog, Steve Miller shares his "frustration" with R: package developers keep on releasing new functionality for R that makes his own work obsolete. For example, there's now pre-packaged functionality in R for enhanced dotplots, Economist-style graphics, additive regression models and more, which ... [Read more...]

As I stand[*] here at Heathrow waiting for my flight back to the States, I thought I'd dash off a few quick reflections of the userR! 2011 conference at University Warwick. It was an outstanding event. There's something about a conference of just a few hundred attendees (there were about 450) that ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

We've noted before that with the RGoogleVis package, it's easy to make motion charts in R, and create a web-based interactive chart that reflects the synchronous movements of two or three variables over time. R user Jeffrey Breen has a great new blog post showing exactly how easy it is, ... [Read more...]

The latest issue of the R Journal is out, and as always includes many useful articles about using R and R packages. Articles in Volume 3/1 dive into topics including creating test for R packages with test_that; dealing with times, time zones, dates and holidays with timeDate; social network analysis ... [Read more...]

Christian Gunning has a great example of using Rcpp to speed up a for loop in R. For his agent-based simulation, Christian needed to repeatedly call the rbinom function in a loop. (Unfortunately, you can't pass a vector to the size argument, which would have solved the problem.) Using the ... [Read more...]

Statistics and data mining often get bundled together, but (in my opinion), they're generally different practices with different goals. As a language designed for statistics, much of R's core functionality is focused on exploring and understanding data: model design, inference, and visualization. But when your goal is simply to get ... [Read more...]

Data Scientist Antonio Piccolboni recently published this comparison of the various language and interfaces available for programming Big Data analysis tasks in the map-reduce framework. The interfaces he reviewed included: Java Hadoop (mature and efficient, but verbose and difficult to program) Cascading (brings an SQL-like flavor to Java programming with ... [Read more...]

(Guest post on R-bloggers by Charlie Sharpsteen) Cameron and I are pleased to announce version 0.6.0 of the tikzDevice package which should be available shortly at your local [Read more...]

If you missed Wednesday's webinar on Deploying Predictive Analytics with Revolution R, PMML and ADAPA, the presentation slides and the replay (in WMV, reg. req'd) format are now available for download. Here are some additional references, from the closing slide: How Revolution R and ADAPA work together The PMML Package ... [Read more...]

The latest edition of the Journal of Statistical Software is out, with plenty of interesting articles for R users. A must-read is Hadley Wickham's article on "The Split-Apply-Combine Strategy for Data Analysis", which makes a compelling argument for the use of the plyr package to partition datasets and apply sub-group ... [Read more...]

The plyr package (by Hadley Wickham) is one of the few R packages for which I can claim to have used for all of my statistical projects. So whenever a new version of plyr comes out I tend to be excited about it (as was when version 1.2 came out with ... [Read more...]

Ever tried to find a specific function or algorithm in R that you're sure that someone has implemented in a CRAN package, but you don't know which one? Now you can find it, in the R Packages section of R community site inside-R.org. The R Packages section now includes ... [Read more...]

I’m currently writing some lecture notes on R and I used the phrase “a R package” without thinking. Since the word following the article “a” was a consonant, I automatically went for “a” instead of “an”. The problem is that “R” sounds likes a vowel, so “a R package” ... [Read more...]

In some work that I am currently involved in, we have to decide which GUI engine we should use. As an obvious starter, we decided to have a look at what other people are using in their packages. While cran helpfully displays all the R packages that are available, it ... [Read more...]

The doSMP package (and its companion package, revoIPC), previously bundled only with Revolution R, is now available on CRAN for use with open-source R under the GPL2 license. In short, doSMP makes it easy to do SMP parallel processing on a Windows box with multiple processors. (It works on Mac ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

Packages for R are being added and updated so frequently now that it's tough to keep up with them all (the @CRANberriesFeed Twitter feed helps, though). But here are a couple of recent package updates that caught my eye: The Rcpp package for seamless integration between R and C++ has ... [Read more...]

Want to keep up-to-date on the latest R packages released to CRAN? Dirk Eddelbuettel's CRANberries service now tweets the release of new R packages to @CRANberriesFeed, so all you need to do is follow that user on Twitter. R hackers may also be interested to see how this Twitter feed ... [Read more...]

Hans Rosling popularized Motion Charts -- 2-d scatterplots that animate over time -- with the GapMinder project. Motion Charts were taken to their augmented-reality extreme in this clip from the BBC programme, The Joy of Stats, but now you can create similar (if less audacious) motion charts for yourself with ... [Read more...]