Two recent salary surveys have shown that R language skills attract median salaries in excess of $110,000 in the United States. In the 2014 Dice Tech Salary Survey of over 17,000 technology professionals, the highest-paid IT skill was R programming. While big-data skills in general featured strongly in the top tier, having R at the top of the list...
Blog Archives
Winter Olympic Medal Standings, presented by R
There's no shortage of web sites listing the current medal standings at Sochi, not least the official Winter Olympics Medal Tally. And here's the same tally, rendered with R: Click through to see a real-time version of the chart, created with RStudio's Shiny by Ramnath Vaidyanathan. (By the way, does anyone know if it's possible to embed a live...
In case you missed it: January 2014 roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from January of particular interest to R users: Princeton’s Germán Rodríguez has published a useful “Introduction to R” guide, with a focus on linear and logistic regression. The rxDForest function in the RevoScaleR package fits random forests of histogram-binning trees. A tutorial on using the xts package to analyze and...
R is 15th of top programming languages in latest RedMonk ranking
Analyst firm RedMonk periodically publishes rankings of the Top 20 programming languages, as measured by activity on StackOverflow and number of repositories on GitHub. In their most recent ranking (January 2014), R is ranked #15 amongst all programming languages. An impressive ranking for a domain-specific language; the top 3 were the general-purpose languages Java, Javascript and PHP. Here's a...
Princeton’s guide to linear modeling and logistic regression with R
If you're new to the R language but keen to get started with linear modeling or logistic regression in the language, take a look at this "Introduction to R" PDF, by Princeton's Germán Rodríguez. (There's also a browsable HTML version.) In a crisp 35 pages it begins by taking you through the basics of R: simple objects, importing data,...
NYT’s 4th Down Bot gives the SuperBowl edge to the Broncos
Who will win the SuperBowl this Sunday: Seattle or Denver? As pundits around the country weigh in with their predictions, you might want to check out the analysis from the New York Times' 4th Down Bot, which compares the coaches' calls on fourth down plays with what historical statistics and a point-forecasting model indicate would have been the ideal...
John Chambers recounts the history of S and R
"R has had a revolutionary effect on the way statistics are communicated." So says John Chambers: one of the members of the R-core team overseeing R; and co-inventor of the S language. In this interview with Trevor Hastie (his co-author on Statistical Models in S), John Chambers recounts his involvement in the birth of the S language in 1976,...
Demo this Wednesday: Drag-and-drop to create R-based workflows
Want to see how you can use a drag-and-drop user interface to run and share R code? Check out our webinar next Wednesday January 29 (hosted by Alteryx and Revolution Analytics): Creating Value That Scales with Revolution Analytics & Alteryx. In the webinar, Dan Putler (Alteryx's Data Artisan in Residence) will demonstrate the Alteryx drag-and-drop Alteryx GUI, which provides...
Fast and easy data munging, with dplyr
RStudio's Hadley Wickham has just introduced a new package for filtering, selecting, restructuring and aggregating tabular data in R: the dplyr package. It's similar in concept to Hadley's original plyr package from 2009, but with several key improvements: It works exclusively with data in R data frames; It can process data in remote databases (with the transformations done in-database...
Easy data maps with R: the choroplethr package
Choropleth maps are a popular way of representing spatial or geographic data, where a statistic of interest (say, income, voting results or crime rate) are color-coded by region. R includes all of the necessary tools for creating choropleth maps, but Trulia's Ari Lamstein has made the process even easier with the new choroplethr package now available on github. With...
Plotly: collaborative, publication-quality graphing.
