Publications by David Smith
Programmatically create interactive Powerpoint slides with R
Powerpoint is a powerful application for creating presentations, and allows you to include all sorts of text, pictures, animations and interactivity to create a compelling story. Most of the time you'll use the Powerpoint application to create slides, but if you want to include data and/or charts in your slides, in the interests of reproducibilit...
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Reach for your Matlab data with R
If you work with both Matlab and R, the R.matlab package maintained by Henrik Bengtsson on CRAN helps you to connect the two environments by allowing you to read and write Matlab's MAT data file format from R (even if you don't have Matlab installed). This allows you to pass data between Matlab and R via the filesystem. But if you want to buil...
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Preview of EARL Boston, November 2-4
I'm honoured to be giving the opening keynote at the Effective Applications of R Conference (EARL) Conference in Boston on November 2. My presentation will be on the business economics and opportunity of open source data science, with a focus on applications that are now possible given the convergence of big data platforms, cloud technology, and ...
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Ross Ihaka, co-creator of R, in the Economist
Thanks to Dr George Esaw, I recently learned that Ross Ihaka, co-creator of R, was featured in a full-page advertisement placed in The Economist by the University of Auckland back in April: Image credit: The Economist / University of Auckland (via George Esaw) Click on the image for a larger version, and if you can't read the text I've reproduc...
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Revolution R now available with SQL Server Community Preview
The new SQL Server 2016 is now available as part of the Community Technical Preview program, and as presaged it embeds connectivity with the R language and the big-data statistical algorithms of Revolution R Enterprise. SQL Server 2016 includes two ways of calling R. The first is by embedding R code direcly in a SQL Stored Procedure, which can th...
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Demo: R in SQL Server 2016
At the PASS Summit in Seattle this week, Microsoft's Jason Wilcox and Gopi Kumar demonstrated a SQL Server 2016 application that embeds R to predict what time you need to leave to catch a flight, given traffic, check-in time, and the likelihood of a flight leaving early or being delayed. The underlying preditive model was created with the RevoSc...
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R Consortium funds first community project, accepting proposals for more
The R Consortium Infrastructure Steering Committee (chaired by Hadley Wickham) announced today the award of its first grant for an R community development project: $85,000 to Gábor Csárdi to implement the R-Hub project. As a board member of the R Consortium, I'm pleased to say this is a great first project for the R Consortium to get behin...
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Betterment uses R for modeling and reporting
Betterment, the online automated investing service, uses R for modeling, analysis and reporting. In a recent blog post on the company website, data scientist Sam Swift suggests using R or Python as open data analysis platforms and goes on to reveal: Here at Betterment, we use both. We use Python more for data pipeline processes and R more for mo...
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In case you missed it: October 2015 roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from October of particular interest to R users. A video from the PASS 2015 conference in Seattle shows R running within SQL Server 2016. The preview for SQL Server 2016 includes Revolution R Enterprise (as SQL Server R Services). A way of dealing with confounding variables in experiments: instr...
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New surveys show continued popularity of R
Two recent surveys — one based on LinkedIn skills data, and another a direct survey of data miners — show that R remains the most popular software for statistical data analysis. In a study of skills associated with LinkedIn profiles by RJmetrics (and also reported on Forbes), “data analysis” was unsurprisingly the skill most associated w...
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