Publications by David Smith
Knime 3.4 connections to Microsoft R, Azure
Version 3.4 of the Knime Analytics Platform, the open-source data science workflow toolbox, was released back in July. With that release came new integrations with Azure and Microsoft R Server, which were highlighted in a recent blog post. With Knime 3.4, you can use Microsoft R Server packages in an R node, and connect to data services in Azure....
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In case you missed it: August 2017 roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from August of particular interest to R users. Using the featurizeText function in the MicrosoftML package to extract ngrams from unstructured text. A joyplot visualizes the probabilities associated with phrases like “highly likely” and “little chance” by a sample of 46 Redditors. Two exampl...
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Hurricane Harvey’s rains, visualized in R by USGS
On August 26 Hurricane Harvey became the largest hurricane to make landfall in the United States in over 20 years. (That record may yet be broken by Irma, now bearing down on the Florida peninsula.) Harvey's rains brought major flooding to Houston and other coastal areas in the Gulf of Mexico. You can see the rainfall generated by Harvey across T...
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Online textbook on data visualization with the ggplot2 package
A new online textbook, Data Visualization for Social Science, will teach you everything you need to know about creating beautiful and elegant data visualizations using the ggplot2 package and the R language. The author Kieran Healy is a professor of Sociology at Duke University who has designed data visualizations featured in outlets like The...
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Trending topics on cable news: the newsflash package
Want to know what's capturing the attention of the producers at the 24-hour cable news stations? There's no equivalent of Twitter's trending topics for the likes of CNN or BBC News, but the newsflash package for R by Bob Rudis can extract the latest trending topics from the TV news stations. It seems TV news topics were much less homogenous yest...
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Working with data frames in SQL Server R Services
Most R users are quite familiar with data frames: the data.frame is the fundamental object type for working with columnar data in R. But for SQL Server users, the data frame is an important concept to understand, since it will be the main object type in R used to store data from SQL tables. This guide to working with data frames with SQL Server R...
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Microsoft R Open 3.4.1 now available
Microsoft R Open (MRO), Microsoft's enhanced distribution of open source R, has been upgraded to version 3.4.1 and is now available for download for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This update upgrades the R language engine to R 3.4.1 and updates the bundled packages. MRO is 100% compatible with all R packages. MRO 3.4.1 points to a fixed CRAN snap...
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Recap: Applications of R at EARL London 2017
The fourth EARL London conference took place last week, and once again it was an enjoyable and informative showcase of practical applications of R. Kudos to the team from Mango for hosting a great event featuring interesting talks and a friendly crowd. As always, there were more talks on offer than I was able to attend (most of the event was in t...
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Hurricane Irma’s rains, visualized with R
The USGS has followed up their visualization of Hurricane Harvey rainfalls with an updated version of the animation, this time showing the rain and flooding from Hurricane Irma in Florida: Another #rstats #dataviz! Precip and #flooding from #HurricaneIrma ? #opensource code: https://t.co/rpocPQe7zR #openscience pic.twitter.com/rGX1SNiYEM — USG...
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Preview: ALTREP promises to bring major performance improvements to R
Changes are coming to the internals of the R engine which promise to improve performance and reduce memory use, with dramatic impacts in some circumstances. The changes were first proposed by Gabe Becker at the DSC Conference in 2016 (and updated in 2017), and the implementation by Luke Tierney and Gabe Becker is now making its way into the de...
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