Publications by David Smith
Revolution R Open 3.2.2 now available
Revolution R Open, the enhanced open source R distribution from Revolution Analytics and Microsoft, is now available for download. This update brings multi-threaded performance to the latest update to the R engine from the R Core Group, which includes several improvements and bug fixes. Significant amongst these is default support for HTTPS conn...
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A quick look at BlueSky Statistics
BlueSky Statistics is a new GUI-driven statistical data analysis tool for Windows. It provides a series of dialogs to import and manipluate data, and to perform statistical analysis and visualization tasks. (Think: more like SPSS than RStudio.) The underlying operations are implemented using R code, which you can inspect and reuse. This video ...
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In case you missed it: August 2015 roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from August of particular interest to R users. Creating interactive time series charts of financial data in R. Many R books have been translated into Chinese. A tutorial on visualizing current-events geographic data with choropleths. Revolution R Enterprise 7.4.1 is now available on Windows and ...
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Free online Data Science and Machine Learning course starts Sep 24
Microsoft is sponsoring another free MOOC starting on September 24: Data Science and Machine Learning Essentials. This course provides a five-week introduction to machine learning and data science concepts, including the open-source programming tools for data science: R and Python. (Read more about the course in this post on TechNet.) This cou...
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Applications of R at EARL 2015
The Effective Applications of R (EARL) Conference (held last week in London) is well-named. At the event I saw many examples of R being used to solve real-world industry problems with advanced statistics and data visualization. Here are just a few examples: AstraZeneca, the pharmaceutical company, uses R to design clinical trials, and to predic...
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Making it easy to use RHadoop on HDInsight Hadoop clusters
The RHadoop packages make it easy to connect R to Hadoop data (rhdfs), and write map-reduce operations in the R language (rmr2) to process that data using the power of the nodes in a Hadoop cluster. But getting the Hadoop cluster configured, with R and all the necessary packages installed on each node, hasn't always been so easy. But now with HD...
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Call R functions from any application with the AzureML package
If you've developed a useful function in R (say, a function to make a forecast or prediction from a statistical model), you may want to call that function from an application other than R. For example, you might want to display the forecast (calculated in R) as part of a desktop, web-based or mobile application. One solution is to install R along...
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Hadley Wickham’s "Ask Me Anything" on Reddit
Hadley Wickham, RStudio's Chief Scientist and prolific author of R books and packages, conducted an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session on Reddit this past Monday. The session was tremendously popular, generating more than 500 questions/comments and promoting the AMA to the front page of Reddit. If you're not familiar with Hadley's work (which would be...
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Amanda Cox on using R at the NYT
For more than six years, the New York Times has been using the R language to develop and implement much of the fantastic data journalism on the website and in the newspaper. A few months ago graphics editor Amanda Cox was interviewed for the Data Stories podcast, where she described the process for creating the interactive data visualizations at...
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In case you missed it: September 2015 roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from September of particular interest to R users. A tutorial on using R with Jupyter Notebooks and how to control the size of R graphics therein. A new version of Revolution R Open is available, featuring multi-threaded computing for R 3.2.2. One benefit of fitting statistical models to large data...
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