Publications by David Smith
R in Nature, Mashable
R was recently the subject of a feature article in the prestigious science magazine Nature: Programming tools: Adventures with R. Besides being free, R is popular partly because it presents different faces to different users. It is, first and foremost, a programming language — requiring input through a command line, which may seem forbiddin...
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Happy New Year! A look at the top posts from 2014.
Happy New Year everyone! Another year has come and gone, and this blog has just entered its seventh year of publication. (Once again, I missed the anniversary back on December 9.) Thanks to everyone who has supported this blog over the past 6 years by reading, sharing and commenting on our posts. And an extra- special thanks to all of the guest b...
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Talk to R
Here's a neat demo from Yihui Xie: you can talk to this R graph and customize it with voice commands. You'll need to click through the link to start the demo in a new window, and you'll need to be using Chrome and allow access to your microphone. (If you can't get it to work on your system, here's a video demo of Yihui using the app.) But with t...
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Twitter’s new R package for anomaly detection
For Twitter, finding anomalies — sudden spikes or dips — in a time series is important to keep the microblogging service running smoothly. A sudden spike in shared photos may signify an “trending” event, whereas a sudden dip in posts might represent a failure in one of the back-end services that needs to be addressed. To detect such anoma...
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In case you missed it: December 2014 roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from November of particular interest to R users. R was featured in recent articles in Nature News and Mashable. A recap of the 6th Spanish R Users Conference. R was the recipient of a 2014 “Bossie” award for best open-source big data tools. A fractal Christmas tree created with R. You can use ...
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Bioconductor project advances understanding of genetics
Bioconductor is a project to develop and curate a collection of R packages used for analysis of genetic data (specifically, analysis and comprehension of high-throughput genomic data). With the wealth of genetic data on humans and animals now available, Bioconductor is widely used in medical research to understand how genes influence our health,...
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Join and set operations come to dplyr
The team at RStudio have just released an update to the immensely useful dplyr package, making it even more powerful for manipulating data frame data in R. The new 0.4.0 version adds new “verbs” to the syntax for mutating joins (left join, right join, etc.), filtering joins, and set operations (intersection and union). There's also some new d...
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R is still hot, and getting hotter
It's been more than four years since I wrote the white paper R is Hot with the goal of introducing R to companies who need modern and flexible data analysis software. It's still the most-downloaded whitepaper on the Revolution Analytics website. But a lot has changed in the past four years: R's popularity has grown, and more and more companies ar...
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Learn Statistics and R online from Harvard
Harvard University is offering a free 5-week on-line course on Statistics and R for the Life Sciences on the edX platform. The course promises you will learn the basics of statistical inference and the basics of using R scripts to conduct reproducible research. You'll just need a backround in basic math and programming to follow along and comp...
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A beautiful story about NYC weather
Inspired by Tufte's classic visualization of New York City weather in 2013, Alex Bresler used the R language to update the chart for 2014: (Click the image to view the zoomable SVG version.) The R code to create the plot is available on GitHub, and is easily adapted to display data for any of the other cities provided in the University of Dayt...
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