Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft's annual developer conference, wrapped up last week and many of the big announcements focused on artificial intelligence and machine learning. The keynote presentation from Microsoft's Cloud AI lead Eric Boyd showcases the major developments, or you can check out his accompanying blog post for a written summary. ... [Read more...]

You probably saw this XKCD last week, which brought a grimace of recognition to statisticians everywhere: It's so realistic, that Barry Rowlingson was able to reproduce all but two of the "charts" above with a simple R function (and a little help from the xkcd ggplot2 theme): And now for @... [Read more...]

Data scientists often work with geographic data that needs to be visualized on a map, and sometimes the maps themselves are the data. The data is often located in two-dimensional space (latitude and longitude), but for some applications we have a third dimension as well: elevation. We could represent the ... [Read more...]

If you want to run R in the cloud, you can of course run it in a virtual machine in the cloud provider of your choice. And you can do that in Azure too. But Azure provides seven dedicated services that provide the ability to run R code, and you ... [Read more...]

During the EARL (Enterprise Applications of the R Language) conference in London last week, the organizers asked me how I thought the conference had changed over the years. (This is the conference's fifth year, and I'd been to each one.) My response was that it reflected the increasing maturity of ... [Read more...]

I had a great time at the EARL Conference in London last week, and as always came away invigorated by all of the applications of R that were presented there. I'll do a full writeup of the conference later this week, but in the meantime I wanted to share the ... [Read more...]

President Trump is once again causing distress by downplaying the number of deaths caused by Hurricane Maria's devastation of Puerto Rico last year. Official estimates initially put the death toll at 15 before raising it to 64 months later, but it was clear even then that those numbers were absurdly low. The ... [Read more...]

Author and research engineer Joel Grus kicked off an important conversation about Jupyter Notebooks in his recent presentation at JupyterCon: There's no video yet available of Joel's talk, but you can guess the theme of that opening slide, and walking through the slides conveys the message well, I think. Yuhui ... [Read more...]

Azure HDInisght was recently updated with version 9.3 of ML Services in HDInsight, which provides integration with R and Python. In particular, it makes it possible to run R and Python within HDInsight's managed Spark instance. The integration provides: R and Python support, with interaction via Visual Studio, VS Code, or ... [Read more...]

In US politics news, the New York Times took the unusual step this week of publishing an anonymous op-ed from a current member of the White House (assumed to be a cabinet member or senior staffer). Speculation about the identity of the author is, of course, rife. Much of the ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from August of particular interest to R users. A guide to installing R and RStudio with packages and multithreaded BLAS on various platforms. Some tips for Excel users migrating to R for data analysis. Videos of presentations from the New York ... [Read more...]

If you want to do statistical analysis or machine learning with data in SQL Server, you can of course extract the data from SQL Server and then analyze it in R or Python. But a better way is to run R or Python within the database, using Microsoft ML Services ... [Read more...]

R is an amazing language with 25 years of development behind it, but you can make the most from R with additional components. An IDE makes developing in R more convenient; packages extend R's capabilities; and multi-threaded libraries make computations faster. Since these additional components aren't included on the official R ... [Read more...]

If you're familiar with analyzing data in Excel and want to learn how to work with the same data in R, Alyssa Columbus has put together a very useful guide: How To Use R With Excel. In addition to providing you with a guide for installing and setting up R ... [Read more...]

The videos from the NYC R conference have been published, and there are so many great talks there to explore. I highly recommend checking them out: you'll find a wealth of interesting R applications, informative deep dives on using R (and a few other applications as well), and some very ... [Read more...]

Working with a new data visualization tool, and wondering how to create a specific type of chart? The Chartmaker Directory (designed by Andy Kirk) indexes more than 35 tools and over 50 charts, and provides links to examples from each combination. Here's an intentionally small detail from the index, where each hollow ... [Read more...]

Many illusions are based on the fact that our perceptions of color or brightness of an object are highly dependent on the background surrounding the object. For example, in this image (an example of the Cornsweet illusion) the upper and lower blocks are exactly the same color, according to the ... [Read more...]

Every wanted to make R talk to you? Now you can, with the mscstts package by John Muschelli. It provides an interface to the Microsoft Cognitive Services Text-to-Speech API (hence the name) in Azure, and you can use it to convert any short piece of text to a playable audio ... [Read more...]

Microsoft R Open 3.5.1 has been released, combining the latest R language engine with multi-processor performance and tools for managing R packages reproducibly. You can download Microsoft R Open 3.5.1 for Windows, Mac and Linux from MRAN now. Microsoft R Open is 100% compatible with all R scripts and packages, and works with ... [Read more...]

The latest Redmonk Language Rankings are out. These rankings are published twice a year, and the top three positions in the June 2018 rankings remain unchanged from last time: JavaScript at #1, Java at #2, and Python at #3. The Redmonk rankings are based on Github repositories (as a proxy for developer activity) and ... [Read more...]