Publications by Andrie de Vries
Embedding images in R package help pages
by Andrie de Vries Have you noticed that most R help does not contain any images? Historically, this was for a good reason: most programming language help assumes that you use the system on a text-only system, e.g. a headless linux server. If your system has no graphical capabilities, but the help contains images, then the help itself can become ...
2520 sym R (443 sym/1 pcs) 2 img
Using segmented regression to analyse world record running times
by Andrie de Vries A week ago my high school friend, @XLRunner, sent me a link to the article “How Zach Bitter Ran 100 Miles in Less Than 12 Hours“. Zach's effort was rewarded with the American record for the 100 mile event. Zach Bitter holds the American record for the 100 mile This reminded me of some analysis I did, many years ago, of...
4916 sym 10 img
Jupyter Notebooks with R in Azure Machine Learning Studio
by Andrie de Vries Earlier today Microsoft announced that Jupyter Notebooks are now available with the R Kernel as a service in Azure Machine Learning (ML) Studio. I wrote about Jupyter Notebooks in September 2015 (Using R with Jupyter Notebooks), where I noted some of the great benefits of using notebooks: Jupyter is an easy to use and conveni...
3815 sym 8 img
On the growth of CRAN packages
by Andrie de Vries Every once in a while somebody asks me how many packages are on CRAN. (More than 8,000 in April, 2016). A year ago, in April 2015, there were ~6,200 packages on CRAN. This poses a second question: what is the historical growth of CRAN packages? One source of information is Bob Muenchen's blog R Now Contains 150 Times as Many...
3766 sym R (852 sym/2 pcs) 6 img
A segmented model of CRAN package growth
by Andrie de Vries A few weeks ago I wrote about the growth of CRAN packages, where I demonstrated how to scrape CRAN archives to get an estimate of the number of packages over time. In this post I briefly mentioned that the Ecdat package contains a dataset, CRANpackages, with snapshots recorded by John Fox and Spencer Graves. Here is a plot of t...
2853 sym 8 img
How to install R packages on an off-line SQL Server 2016 instance
by Andrie de Vries One of the most exciting features of the forthcoming release of SQL Server 2016 (generally available on June 1, and in preview now) is the ability to run R scripts directly in database using SQL Server R Services. This means your R code will run directly on the server, as opposed to first extracting the data to your local R ses...
3566 sym
Introducing the AzureSMR package: Manage Azure services from your R session
by Alan Weaver, Advanced Analytics Specialist at Microsoft Very often data scientists and analysts require access to back-end resources on Azure. For example, they may need to start a virtual machine or resize a Hadoop cluster. This typically requires making a request to the IT department and patiently waiting. AzureSMR is a simple R package th...
2357 sym R (1042 sym/4 pcs)
New features in the checkpoint package, version 0.4.0
by Andrie de Vries In 2014 we introduced the checkpoint package for reproducible research. This package makes it easy to use R package versions that existed on CRAN at a given date in the past, and to use varying package versions with different projects. Previous blog posts include: Introducing the Reproducible R Toolkit and the checkpoint p...
3663 sym R (1745 sym/11 pcs)