Publications by David Smith
In case you missed it: April 2016 roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from April of particular interest to R users. Lukasz Piwek recreates classic graphs from Tufte's 'The Visual Display of Quantitative Information' in R. A preview of upcoming R conferences in Europe. Andrie de Vries updates the data on R package growth on CRAN, and finds a segmented regression mo...
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Free e-book: Effective Graphs with Microsoft R Open
R is a powerful system for creating data visualizations. In fact, R gives you so many options for creating charts that it can be hard to know the best way to communicate effectively. To help you present your data as effectively as possible using R, there's a new (and free) e-book available to download: Effective Graphs with Microsoft R Open. Wri...
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What’s in Pasta Carbonara?
Apparently, people have strong feelings about how pasta carbonara should be made. A 45-second French video showing a one-pot preparation of the dish with farfalle instead of spaghetti and substituting crème fraîche for most of the cheese — and not even stirring the egg into the pasta to cook it! and it was just the yolk! — caused outrag...
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Documentation for Microsoft R Server now online
If you've been thinking about trying the big-data capabilities of Microsoft R Server but wanted to check out the documentation first, you're in luck: the complete Microsoft R Server documentation is now available on MSDN (and is accessible to anyone). There's lots to explore here, but a few highlights you might want to check out include: Gettin...
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Spark 2.0: more performance, more statistical models
Apache Spark, the open-source cluster computing framework, will soon see a major update with the upcoming release of Spark 2.0. This update promises to be faster than Spark 1.6, thanks to a run-time compiler that generates optimized bytecode. It also promises to be easier for developers to use, with streamlined APIs and a more complete SQL imple...
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Microsoft R Open 3.2.5 now available
Microsoft R Open 3.2.5 is now available for download. There are no changes of note in the R langauge engine with this release (R 3.2.5 was just a largely a version number increment). There's lots new on the packages front though: Microsoft R Open 3.2.5 has a default CRAN snapshot date of May 1, 2016 and there was plenty of updates on CRAN in the ...
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Feather: fast, interoperable data import/export for R
Unlike most other statistical software packages, R doesn't have a native data file format. You can certainly import and export data in any number of formats, but there's no native “R data file format”. The closest equivalent is the saveRDS/loadRDS function pair, which allows you to serialize an R object to a file and then load it back into a...
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Predictive Maintenance for Aircraft Engines
Recently, I wrote about how it's possible to use predictive models to predict when an airline engine will require maintenance, and use that prediction to avoid unpleasant (and expensive!) delays for passengers on the ground. Planes generate a lot of data that can be used to make such predictions: today’s engines have hundreds of sensors and ...
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An object has no name
No, it's not a Jaqen H'ghar quote. Recently, Hadley Wickham tweeted the following image: While this image isn't included in Hadley's Advanced R book, he does discuss many of the implications there. The most significant of these is that creating a copy of an object in R doesn't consume any additional memory. (Most of the time, anyway: there ar...
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Visualizing a flood with R
As more settlements in Texas and France are impacted by severe flooding, this is a good time to thank the hydrologists at the NOAA who forecast river level rises in advance and give residents in affected areas time to move to higher ground. Along with topgraphic, rainfall, and weather data, monitoring stations maintained by NOAA and the USGS al...
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