Publications by David Smith
Buzzfeed uses R for Data Journalism
Buzzfeed isn't just listicles and cat videos these days. Science journalist Peter Aldhous recently joined Buzzfeed's editorial team, after stints at Nature, Science and New Scientist magazines. He brings with him his data journalism expertise and R programming skills to tell compelling stories with data on the site. His stories, like this one o...
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R is the fastest-growing language on StackOverflow
StackOverview is a popular Q&A site, and a go-to resource for developers of all languages to find answers to programming problems they may have: most of the time, the question has already been asked and answered, or you can always post a new question and wait for a reply. It's an excellent resource for R users, featuring answers to nearly 100,0...
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Fraud Detection with R and Azure
Detecting fraudulent transactions is a key applucation of statistical modeling, especially in an age of online transactions. R of course has many functions and packages suited to this purpose, including binary classification techniques such as logistic regression. If you'd like to implement a fraud-detection application, the Cortana Analytics gal...
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Because it’s Friday: All I want for Christmas
On this Christmas Day, allow me to share a couple of interesting takes on Mariah Carey's modern Christmas classic, All I Want for Christmas is You. (Unlike most pop songs, Carey wrote the melody and lyrics herself.) If you've somehow managed to avoid hearing the song over the past decade, here it is lip-synced in 2011 by the Royal Navy crew of HM...
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ggplot2 version 2 adds extensibility and other improvements
Despite the ggplot2 project — the most popular data visualization package for R — being in maintenance mode, RStudio's Hadley Wickham has given the R community a surprise gift with a version 2.0.0 update for ggplot2. According to Hadley this is a “huge” update with more than 100 fixes and improvements. The most significant addition is th...
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Creating multi-tab reports with R and jQuery UI
by Matt Parker, Data Scientist at Microsoft One of the great advantages of R's openness is its extensibility. R's abundant packages are the most conspicuous example of that extensibility, and Revolution R Enterprise is a powerful example of how far it can stretch. But R is also part of an entire ecosystem of open tools that can be linked toget...
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The R Project: 2015 in Review
It’s been a banner year for the R project in 2015, with frequent new releases, ever-growing popularity, a flourishing ecosystem, and accolades from both users and press. Here’s a roundup of the big events for R from 2015. R continues to advance under the new leadership of the R Foundation. There were five updates in 2015: R 3.1.3 in M...
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Happy New Year! Top posts of 2015
Happy New Year everyone! It's hard to believe that this blog has now been going since 2008: our anniversary was on December 9. Thanks to everyone who has supported this blog over the past 7 years by reading, sharing and commenting on our posts, and an extra special thanks to my co-bloggers Joe Rickert and Andrie de Vries and all the guest blogg...
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Analyzing movie connections with R
One of the themes of the Christmas movie classic Love Actually is the interconnections between people of different communities and cultures, from the Prime Minister of the UK to a young student in London. StackOverflow's David Robinson brings these connections to life by visualizing the network diagram of 20 characters in the movie, based on sc...
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Video Course: Data Science with Microsoft Azure and R
If you want to get started doing data science with R in the cloud, a good place to start is Stephen Elston's free O'Reilly report, Data Science in the Cloud with Azure ML and R. But if you learn better with a show-and-tell approach, he now also has an O'Reilly Video Training course, Data Science with Microsoft Azure and R. The first part of the ...
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