Publications by David Smith
eRum 2018 to be held in Budapest, May 14-18
The main international R user conference, useR!, is typically hosted in Europe every other year. Back in 2016 when useR! was held in the USA, an alternative conference was held in Poland. Next year (when the useR! conference will be in Australia) the tradition continues, and the 2018 eRum (European R Users Meeting) will be held in Budapest, Hunga...
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A tour of the data.table package by creator Matt Dowle
The data.table package provides a high-performance interface for querying and manipulating data tables (a close cousin of data frames). In the video below (recorded at the H2OWorld conference), creator Matt Dowle gives a tour of the package and provides several examples of its use. If you'd like to see the details on the example Matt presents at...
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Because it’s Friday: Deck the Halls
Sure, this is a promo for a movie, but I'd love to have a full-length single of this: Relatedly, if you want to settle an argument about which pop diva has the greatest vocal range, Giora Simchoni used R to perform frequency analysis of their hits: That's all from us here at the blog for this week, and in fact for a little while: we're taking...
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Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
The Revolutions team is celebrating Christmas today, and we're taking a break with family and enjoying good food. And given the number of Eggnogs that are being prepared — thanks to Hadley Wickham's eggnogr Shiny app — it might be a good idea to take the rest of the week off as well. (You can find the R source behind the eggnogr app here.) W...
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Do you have bad R habits? Here’s how to identify and fix them.
RStudio's Jenny Bryan (whose recent interviews here and here you should definitely check out) has some excellent advice for improving your workflow for R: Use. Projects. — @JennyBryan at #EARLConf2017 #rstats pic.twitter.com/r4a08JhWHT — David Smith (@revodavid) September 13, 2017 If you're you're routinely using setwd to manually change R's...
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Make your R code run faster
There are lots of tricks you can use to make R code run faster: use more efficient data structures; vectorize your R code; offload complex data management tasks to databases. Emily Robinson shares many of these R performance tips in a case study on A/B testing for Etsy. The tips are just as valuable as the process Emily shares for evaluating them...
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Divide and parallelize large data problems with Rcpp
by Błażej Moska, computer science student and data science intern Got stuck with too large a dataset? R speed drives you mad? Divide, parallelize and go with Rcpp! One of the frustrating moments while working with data is when you need results urgently, but your dataset is large enough to make it impossible. This happens often when we need to ...
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Learn your way around the R ecosystem
One of the most powerful things about R is the ecosystem that has emerged around it. In addition to the R language itself and the many packages that extend it, you have a network of users, developers, governance bodies, software vendors and service providers that provide resources in technical information and support, companion applications, trai...
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In case you missed it: December 2017 roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from December of particular interest to R users. Hadley Wickham's Shiny app for making eggnog. Using R to analyze the vocal range of pop singers. A video tour of the data.table package from its creator, Matt Dowle. The European R Users Meeting (eRum) will be held in Budapest, May 14-18. Winners of ...
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R jumps to 8th position in TIOBE language rankings
The R language surged to 8th place in the 2017 TIOBE language rankings, up 8 places from a year before. Fellow data science language language Python also saw an increase in rankings, taking the 4th spot (one ahead of its January 2016 ranking). (Click the table for the current top 20 rankings.) TIOBE ranks programming languages according to their...
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