A new member has just joined the family of Data Science Virtual Machines on Azure: The Deep Learning Virtual Machine. Like other DSVMs in the family, the Deep Learning VM is a pre-configured environment with all the tools you need for data science and AI development pre-installed. The Deep Learning ... [Read more...]

For many of us data scientists, whatever the tools we use to conduct research or perform an analysis, our superiors are going to want the results as a Microsoft Office document. Most likely it's a Word document or a PowerPoint presentation, it probably has to follow the corporate branding guidelines ... [Read more...]

In an effort to provide context to the frequent mass shootings in the United States, Kieran Healy (Associate Professor of Sociology at Duke University) created this updated chart comparing assault death rates in the US to that of 23 other advanced democracies. The chart shows the rate (per 100,000 citizens) of death ... [Read more...]

Statistics involves a lot of mathematics, so one of the nice things about report-generation systems for R like Rmarkdown is that it makes it easy to include nicely-formatted equations by using the LaTeX syntax. So, if we want to include the density function of the Guassian Normal distribution: $$ \frac{1}{{\sigma \... [Read more...]

The R Core team today announced the release of R 3.4.2. This release fixes a number of minor bugs and also includes a performance improvement to the commonly-used function c when applied to vectors with a names attribute. Like all minor releases, this release is backwards compatible with prior releases in ... [Read more...]

by Bob Horton and Vanja Paunic, Microsoft AI and Research Data Group Training deep learning models from scratch requires large data sets and significant computational reources. Using pre-trained deep neural network models to extract relevant features from images allows us to build classifiers using standard machine learning approaches that work ... [Read more...]

Microsoft R Server has received a new name and a major update: Microsoft ML Server 9.2 is now available. ML Server provides a scalable production platform for R — and now Python — programs. The basic idea is that a local client can push R or Python code and have it operationalized on ... [Read more...]

It's been a big day for the team here at Microsoft, with a flurry of announcements from the Ignite conference in Orlando. We'll provide more in-depth details in the coming days and weeks, but for now here's a brief roundup of the news related to data science: Microsoft ML Server 9.2 ... [Read more...]

If you'd like to get started using R with Spark, you'll need to set up a Spark cluster and install R and all the other necessary software on the nodes. A really easy way to achieve that is to launch an HDInsight cluster on Azure, which is just a managed ... [Read more...]

This past Tuesday was Talk Like A Pirate Date, the unofficial holiday of R (aRRR!) users worldwide. In recognition of the day, Bob Rudis used R to create this map of worldwide piracy incidents from 2013 to 2017. The post provides a useful and practical example of extracting data from a website ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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/rGX1... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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. ... [Read more...]

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, ... [Read more...]