Publications by David Smith
How long does it take to get to the airport from NYC?
Todd W Schneider analyzed a database of 1.1 billion taxi rides in New York City from 2009-2015, and discovered some interesting insights on how New Yorkers use cabs. For example, here's a map of the drop-off locations of each ride in the database: The R code to generate this beautiful map is surprisingly simple: just one line to extract the data...
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PowerBI adds support for R
In the latest update released on November 20, PowerBI has added support for R. The desktop edition of Microsoft’s data visualization and reporting tool now allows you to run an R script to generate data; the resulting data frames from the script can then be used for data visualization or any other activities within Power BI. This PowerBI Suppor...
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Happy Thanksgiving!
Today is Thanksgiving Day in the United States, where the nation’s citizens pause to reflect on what they are thankful for. I’d like to take this opportunity to give thanks to the members of the R Core Group who developed R, and continue to donate their time to help the community use R by improving R, writing documentation, maintaining the bu...
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Emojis in ggplot graphics
R user David Lawrence Miller has created an extension for R's ggplot2 package that allows you to use emojis as plotting symbols. The emoGG package (currently only available on github) adds the geom_emoji geom to ggplot2, which uses an emoji code to identify the plotting symbol. For example: ggplot(iris, aes(Sepal.Length, Sepal.Width, color = Spe...
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Microsoft’s new Data Science Virtual Machine
Earlier this week, Andrie showed you how to set up and provision your own virtual machine (VM) to run R and RStudio in Azure. Another option is to use the new Microsoft Data Science Virtual Machine, a pre-configured instance that includes a suite of tools useful to data scientists, including: Revolution R Open (performance-enhanced R) Anaconda P...
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Document your hike with interactive leaflets and R
Maarten Hermans is a sociologist and researcher at KU Leuven in Belgium and an avid hiker. He uses an Android app to track his location and elevation on his hikes, which means he can download his hike data in GPS Exchange Format. With this data and a few R packages, he was then able to create interactive topological maps including his route and...
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Download and plot Google Trends data with R
Google Trends is a useful way to compare changes in popularity of certain search terms over time, and Google Trends data can be used as a proxy for all sorts of difficult-to-measure quantities like economic activity and disease propagation. If you'd like to use Google Trends data in your own analyses, the gtrendsR package for R is now available ...
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R 3.2.3 released
Yesterday, the R Core Team released a new update to R (version 3.2.3, codenamed “Wooden Christmas Tree”), and the source distribution is now available for download on CRAN. Binary versions for Windows, Mac and Linux are also available for download from your local CRAN mirror. This release makes a few small improvements and bug fixes to R, ...
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In case you missed it: November 2015 roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from November of particular interest to R users. You can use emojis as plotting symbols in ggplot2 charts with the emoGG package. A review of local R user group activity in 2015. Giving thanks to the R Core Group. Some best practices for handling secret API keys in R scripts. An animated globe sh...
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Tutorial: Data Science with SQL Server R Services
You may have heard that R and the big-data RevoScaleR package have been integrated with with SQL Server 2016 as SQL Server R Services. If you've been wanting to try out R with SQL Server but haven't been sure where to start, a new MSDN tutorial will take you through all the steps of creating a predictive model: from obtaining data for analysis...
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