Publications by David Smith
Visualize complex data with subplots
Today's guest post comes from Garrett Grolemund, a software developer at RStudio — ed. I think of graphs as a type of visual summary for data. Yet I rarely see graphs used this way within visualizations. Consider tile plots. They group data into 2d bins and then summarize each group with a number. This approach is a go-to tool for understan...
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Tips for Making R User Group Videos
Today's guest post is from Ron Fredericks, videographer and co-founder of LectureMaker, LLC — ed. I was initially surprised to find R user groups (RUGs) so popular. I filmed my first R session during the 2009 Predictive Analytics World in San Francisco. I filmed several more R user sessions over the past three years along with business/scienc...
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Designing Data Apps with R at Periscopic
Today's guest post comes to us from Andrew Winterman, Data Designer at data visualization company Persiscopic. He shares with us the process of using the R language and other tools to create an interactive data application for a client — ed. The Hewlett Foundation contacted us a few months ago because they were interested in exploring ways...
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The PMML Revolution: Predictive analytics at the speed of business
This guest post is by Alex Guazzelli, VP of Analytics at Zementis Inc. — ed. PMML, the Predictive Model Markup Language, is the de facto standard to represent predictive analytics and data mining models. With PMML, it is extremely easy to move a predictive solution from one system to another, since it avoids proprietary issues and incompatibi...
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How to use your favorite fonts in R charts
Today's guest post comes from Winston Chang, a software developer at RStudio — ed. When it comes to making figures in R, you can use any font you like, as long as it's Helvetica, Times, or Courier. Using other fonts that are installed on your computer can seem an impossible task, especially if you want to save the output to PDF. Fortunately...
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Coursera’s free online R course starts today
Coursera offers a number of on-line courses, all available for free and taught by experts in their fields. Today, the course Computing for Data Analysis begins. Taught by Johns Hopkins Biostatistics professor (and co-author of the Simply Statistics blog) Roger Peng, the course will teach you how to program in R and use the language for data anal...
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Thanks to our guest bloggers
I'm back from a very relaxing holiday in Australia. Many thanks to our guest bloggers for filling in over the last couple of weeks with some great information about R while I was away. If you missed any of the posts, be sure to check them out: Douglas McNair, “Population health management with RevoScaleR“ Yihui Xie, “Integrate data and rep...
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Using R in production: industry experts share their experiences
I had a great time yesterday moderating the “R in Action” panel discussion at the DataWeek conference in San Francisco. Each of the panelists represented a company that is actively using R and/or Revolution R Enterprise. Here (from memory, since I couldn't take notes) are some the things they shared: Jesse Bridgewater from eBay talked about ...
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3-D animation of the changing Antarctic ice sheet
Last month we shared an visualization showing the changing extent of Arctic sea-ice. This visualization by the multinational Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) switches the view to the Southern pole and takes the visualization to a whole new level, by animating it in 3-D: The amount of sea ice in the S...
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Browse the in-development R sources at GitHub
As an open-source project, the R source code has always been available to download from the R-project website. You can find source code for the latest released version here, and for the changing-daily new version in progress (R-devel) here. But if you don't have the R sources handy, and just want to check on the contents of a file or two, a read-...
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