Publications by David Smith
In case you missed it: October 2014 Roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from October of particular interest to R users. R hits a new milestone with 6,000 CRAN packages, and R 3.1.2 released. Revolution Analytics announces Revolution R Open, a supported and enhanced downstream distribution of R. (Learn more at the webinar on Wednesday November 12.) Some benchmarks on...
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R leaps to #12 in Tiobe language popularity index
The R language has jumped to number 12 in the November 2014 TIOBE Index of programming language popularity. This is R's highest ranking in the history of the TIOBE index, which has been ranking languages since 2003. A high ranking is an impressive achievement for R given that it is a domain-specific language (designed for data science application...
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Video presentation on Revolution R Open and DeployR Open
The video replay from last week's Introducing Revolution R Open webinar is now available, and I've embedded it below for anyone who may have missed the live presentation. In addition to providing an overview of Revolution R Open, the presentation also introduces other open source projects from Revolution Analytics. If you've ever wanted to embed ...
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The three types of Reddit posts, and how they make it to the front page
Todd Schneider's blog post on solving the traveling salesman problem with R hit the front page of reddit.com. This is a big deal: front-page placement on the popular social news site can drive a ton of traffic (in Todd's case, 1.3 million pageviews). But what factors determine which of reddit's contributed links make it to the front page? (There ...
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Ford uses R for data-driven decision making
Mike Cavaretta is Ford Motor Company’s Chief Data Scientist, and was tasked by the incoming CEO Alan Mulally to help change the culture so that “important decisions within the company had to be based on data”. In a feature article at Dataconomy, he reveals that R is a big part of this revolution at Ford: On the statistical side, we did a...
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Twitter’s R package for detecting breakouts in time series
With so many more devices and instruments connected to the “Internet of Things” these days, there's a whole lot more time series data available to analyze. But time series are typically quite noisy: how do you distinguish a short-term tick up or down from a true change in the underlying signal? To solve this problem, Twitter created the Break...
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The beautiful R charts in London: The Information Capital
If you've lived in or simply love London, a wonderful new book for your coffee-table is London: The Information Capital. In 100 beautifully-rendered charts, the book explores the data that underlies the city and its residents. To create most of these charts, geographer James Cheshire and designer Oliver Uberti relied on programs written in R. Usi...
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Eggnog for Thanksgiving
It's Thanksgiving Day here in the US, so we're taking the day off to spend some time with our families and to eat far too much food. If you're in the US or celebrating Thanksgiving elsewhere, enjoy the day! And for everyone in this season of joy, here's a handy app to scale your eggnog recipe, however many people are around your table. The R c...
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ASA Statistical Graphics Student Paper Competition
If you're a current graduate or undergraduate student and have a knack for data visualization, why not submit a paper to the 2014 ASA Statistical Graphics Student Paper Competition? Many of the past winners used R to create interesting displays of data, or created a new package for R (general statistical computing applications are also eligible...
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Cindy Brewer: helping you choose better color scales for maps
The choice of colors you use in a statistical graphic isn't just about making your chart look good: the colors you choose are often critical to interpretation. For example, you wouldn't want to use a scale like this to represent, say, average income on a map: That palette would be suitable for qualitative data without implicit ordering (say, pol...
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