Publications by David Smith
plyr and reshape: better, faster, more productive
Hadley Wickham has just released updates to his data-manipulation packages for R, plyr and reshape (now called reshape2), that are much faster and more memory-efficient than the previous incarnations. The reshape2 package lets you flexibly restructure and aggregate data using just three functions (melt, acast and dcast), whereas the plyr packa...
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Because it’s Friday: Religion and reading level
The dating site OK Cupid often publishes on their blog interesting analyses of based on the self-reported data from their users, and the latest post is no exception. Most commentary has focused on race/gender preference analysis: according to the “Likes” sections of OK Cupid profiles, white males like “sweaty guitar rock, bro-on-bro comedie...
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R 2.12.0 scheduled for October 15
Just announced: the next release of R, version 2.12.0, will be released on October 15 (in source code form; binaries usually follow the same day or soon thereafter). Looking at the NEWS file, this release features several dozen tweaks and bug fixes to functions in the R language, but nothing so dramatic to prevent it being an easy upgrade from R ...
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Introducing RevoDeployR: Web Services for R
Today, Revolution Analytics announced another add-on to R as part of Revolution R Enterprise. RevoDeployR is a Web Services framework for R, designed to make it easy to scalably and securely integrate computations done in R into other applications like spreadsheets and web pages.The idea is simple: as an R programmer, you can create a script in R...
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New R User Group in Brisbane
There are now four — count 'em, four — local R user groups in Australia, with the addition of the latest group in Brisbane, Queensland. GRUB (Group for R Users in Brisbane) is just getting started and doesn't have a meeting scheduled yet, but if you're in the vicinity why not join up and make a suggestion!meetup.com: Group for R Users in Bri...
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R’s time is now
Jeff Kelly of Tech Target has just published a feature article about R. While R has been around for almost 20 years now (R&R first started the project in 1993), “its time may have finally come”, he says. One thing I really like about the article is how well it highlights R's flexibility and “top-notch” data visualizations. It includes an ...
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Running R on the iPad
I'm a hardcore Mac user, so it's annoying to me that we don't yet support Revolution R Enterprise on MacOS X. Believe me, I've argued the point. But MacOS is still a relatively uncommon platform in business, and there's just not the demand yet from customers to justify porting the Revolution R extensions to MacOS X. (Open-source Revolution R Comm...
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Saptarshi Guha on Hadoop, R
Saptarshi Guha (author of the Rhipe package) joins the likes of Ebay, Yahoo, Twitter and Facebook and as one of just 37 presenters at the Hadoop World conference. (Revolution Analytics is proud to sponsor Saptarshi's presence at this event, which take place in New York on October 12.) He'll be talking about using R and Hadoop to analyze Voice-ov...
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The R-Files: Hadley Wickham
“The R-Files” is an occasional series from Revolution Analytics, where we profile prominent members of the R Community. Name: Hadley Wickham Profession: Assistant Professor of Statistics, Rice University Nationality: New Zealand Years Using R: 10 Known for: Developing popular R packages including ggplot2, plyr, reshape; creator of crantastic...
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Guidelines for efficient R programming
R is designed to make it easy to clearly express statistical ideas in code, but when it come to writing code that runs as fast as possible, there are a few tips, tricks and caveats to be aware of. As part of the BioConductor conference this past summer, Martin Morgan prepared a tutorial on efficient R programming. (Patrick Abouyen presented the t...
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