Publications by David Smith
Highlights of the Data Science Track at Microsoft Ignite
I will be at the AI Summit in San Francisco next month, which means I can't make it to Ignite in Orlando this year. Which is a bit of a shame, because there's a fantastic Data Science track at Ignite. There are 25 sessions on offer, with presentations from my Microsoft colleagues on Microsoft R, Cognitive Toolkit, Bot Framework, the Team Data Sc...
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Gender roles in film direction, analyzed with R
What do women do in films? If you analyze the stage directions in film scripts — as Julia Silge, Russell Goldenberg and Amber Thomas have done for this visual essay for ThePudding — it seems that women (but not men) are written to snuggle, giggle and squeal, while men (but not women) shoot, gallop and strap things to other things. This i...
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Recreating and updating Minard with ggplot2
Minard's chart depicting Napoleon's 1812 march on Russia is a classic of data visualization that has inspired many homages using different time-and-place data. If you'd like to recreate the original chart, or create one of your own, Andrew Heiss has created a tutorial on using the ggplot2 package to re-envision the chart in R: The R script prov...
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Tips and tricks on using R to query data in Power BI
In Power BI, the dashboarding and reporting tool, you can use R to filter, transform, or restructure data via the Query Editor. For example, you could use the mice package to impute missing values, or use the tidytext package to assign sentiment scores to text inputs. As Imke Feldmann explains, there are lots of useful tricks you can accomplish u...
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Packages to simplify mapping in R
Computerworld's Sharon Machlis has published a very useful tutorial on creating geographic data maps with R. (The tutorial was actually published back in March, but I only came across it recently.) While it's been possible to create maps in R for a long time, some recent packages and data APIs have made the process much simpler. The tutorial is b...
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3-D animations with R
R is often used to visualize and animate 2-dimensional data. (Here are just a few examples.) But did you know you can create 3-dimensional animations as well? As Thomas Lins Pedersen explains in a recent blog post, the trick is in using the persp function to translate points in 3-D space into a 2-D projection. This function is normally used t...
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Probably more likely than probable
What kind of probability are people talking about when they say something is “highly likely” or has “almost no chance”? The chart below, created by Reddit user zonination, visualizes the responses of 46 other Reddit users to “What probability would you assign to the phase: <phrase>” for various statements of probability. Each set of r...
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Text featurization with the Microsoft ML package
Last week I wrote about how you can use the MicrosoftML package in Microsoft R to featurize images: reduce an image to a vector of 4096 numbers that quantify the essential characteristics of the image, according to an AI vision model. You can perform a similar featurization process with text as well, but in this case you have a lot more control o...
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Practical Data Science for Stats
PeerJ Preprints has recently published a collection of articles that focus on the practical side of statistical analysis: Practical Data Science for Stats. While the articles are not peer-reviewed, they have been selected and edited by Jennifer Bryan and Hadley Wickham, both well-respected members of the R community. And while the articles provi...
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Preview of EARL London 2017
The next event in the Effective Applications of the R Language (EARL) conference series takes place next week, with EARL London 2017. The EARL conference series got its start in London, and the London event remains the biggest and brightest of the venues. This year's program is no exception, with an impressive raft of tutorials and keynote speake...
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