Publications by David Smith
Analyzing the home advantage in English soccer, with R
It's well-known that the home team has an advantage in soccer (or football, as it's called in England). But which teams have made the most of their home-field advantage over the years? Evolutionary biologist (and Liverpool fan) Joe Gallagher analyzed the percentage of points won in the UK Premier League (which awards 3 points for a win and one ...
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R and Python support now built in to Visual Studio 2017
The new Visual Studio 2017 has built-in support for programming in R and Python. For older versions of Visual Studio, support for these languages has been available via the RTVS and PTVS add-ins, but the new Data Science Workloads in Visual Studio 2017 make them available without a separate add-in. Just choose the “Data Science and analytica...
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R in Financial Services: Challenges and Opportunities
At the New York R Conference earlier this year, my colleague Lixun Zhang gave a presentation on the challenges and opportunites financial services companies encounter when using R. In the talk, he shares some lessons learned while working with an couple of international banks that have been using SAS, but are transitioning workloads to R. The t...
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An Introduction to Spatial Data Analysis and Visualization in R
The Consumer Data Research Centre, the UK-based organization that works with consumer-related organisations to open up their data resources, recently published a new course online: An Introduction to Spatial Data Analysis and Visualization in R. Created by James Cheshire (whose blog Spatial.ly regularly features interesting R-based data visuali...
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R/Finance 2017 livestreaming today and tomorrow
If you weren't able to make it to Chicago for R/Finance, the annual conference devoted to applications of R in the financial industry, don't fret: the entire conference is being livestreamed (with thanks to the team at Microsoft). You can watch the proceedings at aka.ms/r_finance, and recordings will be available at the same link after the even...
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Preview of EARL San Francisco
The first ever EARL (Enterprise Applications of the R Language) conference in San Francisco will take place on June 5-7 (and it's not too late to register). The EARL conference series is now in its fourth year, and the prior conferences in London and Boston have each been a fantastic way to learn how R is used in real-world applications. Judgin...
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Create smooth animations in R with the tweenr package
There are several tools available in R for creating animations (movies) from statistical graphics. The animation package by Yihui Xie will create an animated GIF or video file, using a series of R charts you generate as the frames. And the gganimate package by David Robinson is an extension to ggplot2 that will create a movie from charts created...
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Microsoft R Open 3.4.0 now available
Microsoft R Open (MRO), Microsoft's enhanced distribution of open source R, has been upgraded to version 3.4.0 and is now available for download for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This update upgrades the R language engine to R 3.4.0, reduces the size of the installer image, and updates the bundled packages. R 3.4.0 (upon which MRO 3.4.0 is based) i...
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Love is all around: Popular words in pop hits
Data scientist Giora Simchoni recently published a fantastic analysis of the history of pop songs on the Billboard Hot 100 using the R language. Giora used the rvest package in R to scrape data from the Ultimate Music Database site for the 350,000 chart entries (and 35,000 unique songs) since 1940, and used those data to create and visualize ...
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Reflections on ROpenSci Unconference 2017
Last week I attended the ROpenSci Unconference in Los Angeles, and it was fantastic. Now in its fourth year, the ROpenSci team brought together a talented and diverse group of about 70 R developers from around the world to work on R-related projects in an intense 2-day hackathon. Not only did everyone have a lot of fun, make new connections and ...
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