Publications by David Smith
The software behind this clickbait data visualization will blow your mind
New media sites like Buzzfeed and Upworthy have mastered the art of “clickbait”: headlines and content designed to drive as much traffic as possible to their sites. One technique is to use coy headlines like “If you take a puppy video break today, make sure this is the dog video you watch.” (Gawker apparently spends longer writing a headl...
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An R tutorial for Microsoft Excel users
If you currently use a spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel for data analysis, you might be interested in taking a look at this tutorial on how to transition from Excel to R by Tony Ojeda. The tutorial explains how to use R functions in place of Excel formulas, including tools like =AVERAGE and =VLOOKUP. For the most part, it uses modern R packages ...
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CRAN: the Granddaddy of Analytical Marketplaces
by Bill Jacobs, VP Product Marketing, Revolution Analytics I had a most interesting exchange with an industry analysis firm recently who suggested that application marketplaces were critical to the success of analytical tools, suggesting that Revolution Analytics was remiss in not creating one. I must say, I was taken aback somewhat. In conside...
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Strata 2015: Keynote roundup
I spent last week at the Strata 2015 Conference in San José, California. As always, Strata made for a wonderful conference to catch up on the latest developments on big data and data science, and to connect with colleagues and friends old and new. Having been to every Strata conference since the first in XXXX, it's been interesting to see the fo...
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Talking about R, Data Science and Microsoft on theCUBE
It was a pleasure to appear live on theCUBE last week while attending the Strata conference. In my interview with Jeff Kelly and John Furrier, I talked about the rising popularity of R, the applications of data science, and the recent announcement of Microsoft acquiring Revolution Analytics. I also gushed about the President's shout-out to Data S...
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John Chambers Statistical Software Award 2015
In 1998 John M. Chambers (now a member of R-core) won the ACM Software System Award for the S Language, which (in the words of the committee) “forever altered how people analyze, visualize, and manipulate data”. John graciously donated the prizemoney to support budding researchers in statistical computing: his Statistical Software Award has b...
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ComputerWorld’s R for Beginners Hands-On Guide
Computerworld's Sharon Machlis has done a great service for the R community — and R especially novices — by creating the on-line Beginner's Guide to R. You can read our overview of her guide from 2013 here, but it's been regularly updated since then. As an added bonus, the guide is now available as a downloadable PDF for your offline-readin...
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Color extraction with R
Given all the attention the internet has given to the colors of this dress, I thought it would be interesting to look at the capabilities for extracting colors in R. R has a number of packages for importing images in various file formats, including PNG, JPG, TIFF, and BMP. (The readbitmap package works with all of these.) In each case, the result...
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Welcome to the Hadleyverse
It's fair to say that Hadley Wickham, chief scientist at RStudio and a new member of the R Foundation, has made great contributions to the R community. Not only is he the author of several R-related books including Advanced R, Hadley is also the author of dozens of R packages which have transformed the way that data scientists work with R. His p...
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R 3.1.3 now available
R 3.1.3, the final update in the R 3.1 series, has been released. As of this writing only the source distribution is currently available, but expect binary builds for Windows, Mac and various Linux platforms to appear soon on your local CRAN mirror. As has become usual in March, this release is primarily for minor bugs and improvements in R, as t...
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