Publications by David Smith
DeployR 7.4 released
A new version of DeployR, the server-based framework that provides simple and secure R integration for application developers, is now available. (If you're new to DeployR, take a look at the DeployR Overview or download the white paper, Using DeployR to Solve the R Integration Problem.) This update brings several new features, including: New ...
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Association Rules and Market Basket Analysis with R
In today's data-oriented world, just about every retailer has amassed a huge database of purchase transaction. Each transaction consists of a number of products that have been purchased together. A natural question that you could answer from this database is: What products are typically purchased together? This is called Market Basket Analysis (o...
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New packages for reading data into R — fast
Hadley Wickham and the RStudio team have created some new packages for R, which will be very useful for anyone who needs to read data into R (that is, everyone). The readr package provides functions for reading text data into R, and the readxl package provides functions for reading Excel spreadsheet data into R. Both are much faster than the func...
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In case you missed it: March 2015 roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from March of particular interest to R users. Overview of “Targeted learning” packages for R, including SuperLearner and tmle. The 7 most common R error messages, by frequency of mentions on StackOverflow. Slides and a webinar replay on reproducible data analysis with R and the “checkpoint...
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Using R in Myanmar (and other low-bandwidth environments)
R is already in use in well over 100 cities around the world, and now we can add another to the list: Yangon, Myanmar. Ben Marwick is a trainer with Software Carpentry (a non-profit organization devoted to improving basic computing skills among researchers in science, engineering, medicine, and other disciplines), and last month he visited the ...
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R 3.2.0 released
The R Core Team announced yesterday that the latest update to R, R 3.2.0 (codename: “Full of Ingredients”) is now available. As of this writing the source bundle is available for download, but Mac and Windows binaries aren't yet available. You should be able to download them from your local CRAN mirror in the next day or so. This is the annua...
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Financial Times tracks unemployment with R
The FT Data section of the Financial Times now has a neat interactive unemployment tracker (free but onerous registration required) that lets you explore employment rates and trends in EU member countries from 2004-2013: The graphic was created by FT Data Journalist John-Burn Murdoch with R. To automate the process of collecting the underlying ...
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Microsoft hiring engineers for R projects
Are you a talented software engineer who would like to build out the R ecosystem and help more companies access the power of R? Microsoft (Revolution Analytics' parent) is hiring a new team to do just that: Our mission is to empower enterprises to easily and cost-effectively build high-scale analytics solutions leveraging R. Exponential growth h...
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Blue period: Analyzing the color of paintings with R
While movies have been getting more orange with time, painting have been going the other direction. Paintings today are generally more blue than they were a few hundred years ago. The image above shows the color spectrum of almost 100,000 paintings created since 1800. Martin Bellander used R to create the image, by scraping images from the BBC Y...
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Awesome-R: A curated list of the best add-ons for R
One of the great things about R is that there's so much available to use with it: there are several interfaces to choose from, thousands of add-on packages to extend its capabilites, hundreds of books and on-line tutorials — an abundance of riches to improve your R experience. But with that abundance comes a problem: how to find the best add-on...
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