Publications by David Smith
R Tools for Visual Studio 0.5 now available
R Tools for Visual Studio, the open-source Visual Studio add-in for R programmers, has a new update available for download. RTVS 0.5 makes it easier to run R within SQL Server 2016 as a stored procedure, and supports multiple windows for R graphics. RTVS 0.5 makes use of Visual Studio's polyglot nature so you can manage and edit SQL queries with...
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The new R Graph Gallery
Once upon a time, there was the original R Graph Gallery, by Romain François. Sadly, it's been unavailable for several years. Now there's a new R Graph Gallery to fill the void, created by Yan Holtz. It contains more than 200 data visualizations categorized by type, along with the R code that created them. You can browse the gallery by types of...
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Election 2016: Tracking Emotions with R and Python
Temperament has been a key issue in the 2016 presidential election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and an issue highlighted in the series of three debates that concluded this week. Quantifying “temperament” isn’t an easy task, but The Economist used the Microsoft Emotion API to chart the anger, contempt, sadness and surprised exp...
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Webinar: Changing Lives with Data Science and R at Microsoft
If you didn't have a chance to catch my presentation at the Machine Learning and Data Science Summit, I'll be reprising an updated version of the talk in a live webinar on Tuesday, November 1. I'll also be taking questions from the audience after the webinar. You can register here, and the details of the webinar are below. Changing Lives with D...
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Introducing R-hub, the R package builder service
If you're developing a package for R to share with others — on CRAN, say — you'll want to make sure it works for others. That means testing it on various platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, and all the versions thereof), and on various versions of R (current, past, and future). But it's likely you only have access to one platform, and installing ...
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ReporteRs: Manager-friendly Word or Powerpoint documents created with R
As much as we data scientists would like to work solely in R, there inevitably comes the time when our managers or customers want to see the fruits of our labours as a Word document or PowerPoint presentation. And not just any old document: it needs to be in the official corporate template, and will no doubt go through a series of back-and-forth ...
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Free e-book: Data Science with SQL Server 2016
There's a new e-book available to download free from Microsoft Academy: Data Science with Microsoft SQL Server 2016. This 90-page e-book is aimed at data scientists who already have some experience in R, but want to learn how to use R wirth SQL Server. The book was written by some of my most experienced colleagues from Microsoft's data scienc...
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R 3.3.2 now available
R 3.3.2, the latest update to the R language, was released today. Binary releases for Linux and Mac are available now from your local CRAN mirror, and the Windows builds will be available shortly. As a minor update to the R 3.3 series, this update focuses mainly on fixing bugs and doesn't make any major changes to the langauge. As a result, you c...
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A Bayesian election prediction, implemented with R and Stan
If the media coverage is anything to go by, people are desperate to know who will win the US election on November 8. Polls give us some indication of what's likely to happen, but any single poll isn't a great guide (despite the hype that accompanies some of them). One poll is subject to any number of possible errors, statistical and otherwise: th...
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RStudio v1.0 released
When the RStudio first came on the scene in February 2011, there wasn't much in the way of tools for developers using the R language. The R GUI on Windows and Mac had a basic code-editing window, and there were a couple of menu-based GUIs like Rattle and R Commander that were aimed more at those who would prefer not to program in the R language....
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