Publications by David Smith
How to implement neural networks in R
If you've ever wondered how neural networks work behind the scenes, check out this guide to implementing neural networks in scratch with R, by David Selby. You may be surprised how with just a little linear algebra and a few R functions, you can train a function that classifies the red dots from the blue dots in a complex pattern like this: Davi...
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A simple way to set up a SparklyR cluster on Azure
The SparklyR package from RStudio provides a high-level interface to Spark from R. This means you can create R objects that point to data frames stored in the Spark cluster and apply some familiar R paradigms (like dplyr) to the data, all the while leveraging Spark's distributed architecture without having to worry about memory limitations in R. ...
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Microsoft R Open 3.4.3 now available
Microsoft R Open (MRO), Microsoft's enhanced distribution of open source R, has been upgraded to version 3.4.3 and is now available for download for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This update upgrades the R language engine to the latest R (version 3.4.3) and updates the bundled packages (specifically: checkpoint, curl, doParallel, foreach, and iter...
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Registration and talk proposals now open for useR!2018
Registration is now open for useR! 2018, the official R user conference to be held in Brisbane, Australia July 10-13. If you haven't been to a useR! conference before, it's a fantastic opportunity to meet and mingle with other R users from around the world, see talks on R packages and applications, and attend tutorials for deep dives on R-related...
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Visualize your Strava routes with R
Strava is a fitness app that records you activities, including the routes of your walks, rides and runs. The service also provides an API that allows you to extract all of your data for analysis. University of Melbourne research fellow Marcus Volz created an R package to download and visualize Strava data, and created a chart to visualize all o...
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Scraping a website with 5 lines of R code
In what is rapidly becoming a series — cool things you can do with R in a tweet — Julia Silge demonstrates scraping the list of members of the US house of representatives on Wikipedia in just 5 R statements: library(rvest)library(tidyverse)h https://t.co/gloY1eErBn“)reps % html_node(“#mw-content-text > div > table:nth-child(18)”) %>% h...
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Applications now open for R Consortium funding for R user groups and small conferences
If you're an organizer of an R-focused meetup group, or are planning a community-led R conference, the 2018 R Consortium R User Group Support Program is now accepting applications for sponsorship. The 2017 program funded 76 user groups and 3 small conferences, and the program is expanding further in 2018. User groups now also receive a compliment...
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Speed up simulations in R with doAzureParallel
I’m a big fan using R to simulate data. When I’m trying to understand a data set, my first step is sometimes to simulate data from a model and compare the results to the data, before I go down the path of fitting an analytical model directly. Simulations are easy to code in R, but they can sometimes take a while to run — especially if there...
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Speed up R with Parallel Programming in the Cloud
This past weekend I attended the R User Day at Data Day Texas in Austin. It was a great event, mainly because so many awesome people from the R community came to give some really interesting talks. Lucy D’Agostino McGowan has kindly provided a list of the talks and links to slides, and I thoroughly recommend checking it out: you're sure to find...
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Analysis of Trump’s State of the Union Speech, with R
President Trump's State of the Union speech was last night, and it seemed to me it dragged on a bit. That's because it was apparently the slowest SOTU speech in history, based on average number of words spoken per minute. The chart below, based on these data, was created by Josh Katz. (The R code for the chart is here. Note the use of his needs ...
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