Publications by David Smith
See R in action at the BUILD conference
Build 2015, the Microsoft conference which brings around 5,000 developers to the Moscone Center in San Francisco, begins tomorrow. The conference is sold out, but you can livestream the keynote presentations from buildwindows.com to catch all the big announcements. You can also follow along on Twitter at the #Build2015 hashtag. There will be a ...
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Benchmarks of RRO on OSX and Ubuntu
Bay Area engineer Vineet Abraham recently ran some benchmarks for Revolution R Open (RRO) running on Mac OS X and on Ubuntu. Thanks to the multi-threaded processing capabilites of RRO, several operations ran much faster than R downloaded from CRAN, without having to change any code: For the most part, RRO performs significantly faster than stan...
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Revolution R Open 8.0.3 now available
Revolution R Open 8.0.3 is now available for download for Windows, OS X, Red Hat, Ubuntu and OpenSUSE. This release includes seveal new features: it upgrades RRO to the R 3.1.3 engine, which adds several new features to the R language, adds support for Ubuntu 15.04, and updates the checkpoint package for reproducibility. RRO is designed to work w...
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Call R and Python from base SAS
Since 2009, it has been possible to call R from SAS programs. However, this integration requires IML, an add-on matrix-object language for SAS which isn't available with all SAS installations and is separate from the standard SAS PROC execution model. Now, engineers at SAS have shared a method of calling R, Python and other open-source tools usin...
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Comparing data frames, data.table and dplyr with random walks
Arthur Charpentier was trying to solve an interesting problem with R: given this data set of random walks in the 2-D plane, what is the likely origin of a pathway that ends in the black circle below? It's pretty easy to generate random data like this with a few lines of code in R. And with 2 million trajectories of 80 points each, you have some ...
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In case you missed it: April 2015 roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from April of particular interest to R users. Joseph Rickert reviews the inaugural New York City R User Conference, featuring Andrew Gelman. Engineer Vineet Abraham compares performance benchmarks for R and Revolution R Open on OS X and Ubuntu. R was featured in the keynotes for the BUILD develope...
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What data science software tools do you use?
KDnuggets is once again running its annual poll of data science software tools, now in its 16th year. If you'd like to participate, visit the KDnuggets poll page and answer the question, “What Predictive Analytics, Data Mining, Data Science software/tools you used in the past 12 months?”. The poll allows you to select up to 20 tools from the...
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Computerworld’s list of R packages for data wrangling
Computerworld's Sharon Machlis published today a very useful list of R packages that every R user should know. The list covers packages for data import, data wrangling, data visualization and package development, but for beginning R users the biggest challenge is usually just dealing with data. To that end, I thought it was worth listing the pack...
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In-database R coming to SQL Server 2016
R is coming to SQL Server. SQL Server 2016 (which will be in public preview this summer) will include new real-time analytics, automatic data encryption, and the ability to run R within the database itself: For deeper insights into data, SQL Server 2016 expands its scope beyond transaction processing, data warehousing and business intelligence ...
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Because it’s Friday: Love in the land of Facebook
Today is my 11th wedding anniversary with my wonderful husband Jay, so it's a love-themed Friday post today. Jay and I met before Facebook was a thing, but we've been touched by the congratulations on our timelines today. Those timeline posts reveal a lot about you and your relationships, and last year the Facebook data science team published a s...
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