Publications by David Smith
Introducing Revolution R Open and Revolution R Plus
For the past 7 years, Revolution Analytics has been the leading provider of R-based software and services to companies around the globe. Today, we're excited to announce a new, enhanced R distribution for everyone: Revolution R Open. Revolution R Open is a downstream distribution of R from the R Foundation for Statistical Computing. It's built on...
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Statistics doesn’t have to be so hard: simulate!
My second-favourite keynote from yesterday's Strata Hadoop World conference was this one, from Pinterest's John Rauser. To many people (especially in the Big Data world), Statistics is a series of complex equations, but a just a little intuition goes a long way to really understanding data. John illustrates this wonderfully using an example of da...
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Explore R package connections at MRAN
Many R scripts depend on CRAN packages, and most CRAN packages in turn depend on other CRAN packages. If you install an R package, you'll also be installing its dependencies to make it work, and possibly other packages as well to enable its full functionality. My colleague Andrie posted some R code to map package dependencies a couple of months a...
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Rocker: Docker containers for R
If you haven't heard the buzz about Docker but you often need to spin up Linux-based VM's for testing, simulations, etc. then you should check it out. In short, Docker rocks: we use it for testing our Linux-based distros of Revolution R Open. If you want to use R and Docker together, Dirk Eddelbuettel and Carl Boettiger have made it easy with R...
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Create Fashion Fingerprints with R
How do you summarize fashion? For New York Fashion Week, the New York Times used the idea of “Fashion Fingerprints”, distilling a designer's collections into small fragments highlighting the palette. Here's what Marc Jacobs' current collection looks like: Click through for an interactive version where you can explore each design, and scroll ...
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Integrate R into applications with DeployR Open
If you ever find you need to embed the results of R functions — data, charts, or even a single calculation — into other applications, then you might want to take a look at DeployR Open. DeployR Open is an open-source server-based framework for R, that makes it easy to call out to the server to run R code in real time. The workflow is simple...
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R 3.1.2 released with over 6,000 CRAN packages available
The latest update to the world's most popular statistical data analysis software is now available. R 3.1.2 (codename: “Pumpkin Helmet”) makes a number of minor improvements and bug fixes to the R language engine. You can see the complete list of changes here, which include improvements for the log-Normal distribution function, improved axis ...
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Running R in the Azure ML cloud
The key to making data science successful is making sure you can deploy the machine learning code that data scientists create into applications that rely on the results of the analysis. Microsoft has tackled this problem with Azure ML: machine learning in the cloud. This short video neatly summarizes the process of deploying R code to the cloud i...
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Learn about Revolution R Open in live webinar, November 12
On Wednesday next week, I'll be presenting a live webinar to introduce Revolution R Open and several other open source projects from Revolution Analytics. In the webinar I'll describe: The enhancements included in Revolution R Open The Reproducible R Toolkit and the checkpoint package How to call R from other applications with DeployR Open How t...
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Benchmarking Revolution R Open on Linux
We recently shared some benchmarks for Revolution R Open on the Windows platform, which showed significant improvements compared to R downloaded from CRAN. Those performance gains mainly come from multi-threading: Revolution R Open is linked to the Intel Math Kernel Library, which uses all available cores (rather than just one core) to compute ma...
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