After avoiding the entire medium for years, I've been rather getting into listening to podcasts lately. As a worker-from-home I don't have a commute (the natural use case of podcasts, I guess), but I have been travelling a lot more recently and it's been great to listen to during long ... [Read more...]

If you're a fan of the HBO show Silicon Valley, you probably remember the episode where Jian Yang creates an application to identify food using a smartphone phone camera: Surprisingly, the app in that scene isn't just a pre-recorded special effect: the producers actually developed a smartphone application using Tensorflow (... [Read more...]

Who says there's no art in mathematics? I've long admired the generative art that Thomas Lin Peterson occasionally posts (and that you can see on Instagram), and though he's a prolific R user I'm not quite sure how he makes his art. Marcus Volz has another beautiful portfolio of generative ... [Read more...]

Since its inception over 40 years ago, when S (R's predecessor) was just a sketch on John Chambers' wall at Bell Labs, R has always been a language for providing interfaces. I was reminded of this during Dirk Eddelbuettel's presentation at the Chicago R User Group meetup last night, where he ... [Read more...]

Twitter's bot problem is well documented, influencing discourse on divisive topics like politics and civil rights. But it's getting harder and harder to spot such nefarious bots, who often borrow biographies and tweets from real (and often stolen) profiles to evade detection. (The New York Times recently published an outstanding ... [Read more...]

The Azure Computer Vision API can extract all sorts of interesting information from images — tags describing objects found in the images, locations of detected faces, and more — but today I want to play around with just one: caption generation. I was inspired by @picdescbot on Twitter, which selects random images ... [Read more...]

During a discussion with some other members of the R Consortium, the question came up: who maintains the most packages on CRAN? DataCamp maintains a list of most active maintainers by downloads, but in this case we were interested in the total number of packages by maintainer. Fortunately, this is ... [Read more...]

If you regularly have to deal with specific versions of R, or different package combinations, or getting R set up to work with other databases or applications then, well, it can be a pain. You could dedicate a special machine for each configuration you need, I guess, but that's expensive ... [Read more...]

R 3.4.4 has been released, and binaries for Windows, Mac, Linux and now available for download on CRAN. This update (codenamed "Someone to Lean On" — likely a Peanuts reference, though I couldn't find which one with a quick search) is a minor bugfix release, and shouldn't cause any compatibility issues with ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from February of particular interest to R users. The R Consortium opens a new round of grant applications for R-related user groups and projects, and has issued US$0.5M in grants to date for R-related projects and events. Microsoft R Client 3.4.3 ... [Read more...]

In the latest Redmonk language rankings, R has risen to the #12 position, up from #14 in the June 2017 rankings. (Python remains steady in the #3 position.) The Redmonk rankings are based on activity in StackOverflow (as a proxy for user engagement) and Github (as a proxy for developer engagement). Here's the chart ... [Read more...]

Excel users starting to use R likely have some established concepts about data: where it's stored, how functions apply to data, etc. In general, R does things differently to Excel (or any spreadsheet, in fact). In a useful guide, Steph de Silva from Rex Analytics explains the concepts of data ... [Read more...]

by Subhadeep (Deep) Mukhopadhyay and Douglas Fletcher, Department of Statistical Science, Temple University Bayesians and Frequentists have long been ambivalent toward each other. The concept of “Prior” remains the center of this 250 years old tug-of-war: frequentists view prior as a weakness that can cloud the final inference, whereas Bayesians view ... [Read more...]

The R Consortium passed a significant milestone this month: since its inception, the non-profit body has provided more than US$500,000 in grant funding to project proposed by the R Community. The R Consortium uses the dues from its member organizations to fund grant proposals, which are reviewed twice a year ... [Read more...]

An update to Microsoft R Client, Microsoft's distribution of open source R with additional proprietary packages — including RevoScaleR (for data analysis at scale) and MicrosoftML (for machine learning) — is now available. Microsoft R Client 3.4.3 updates the R engine to R 3.4.3, and (on Linux) now supports deploying computations to a remote ... [Read more...]

If you've ever wanted to play around with big data sets in a Spark cluster from R with the sparklyr package, but haven't gotten started because setting up a Spark cluster is too hard, well ... rest easy. You can get up and running in about 5 minutes using the guide SparklyR ... [Read more...]

Using your smartphone (any modern phone with a built-in accelerometer should work), visit the Cast Your Spell page created by Nick Strayer. (If you need to type it to your phone browser directly, here's a shortlink: bit.ly/castspell .) Scroll down and click the "Press To Cast!" button, and then ... [Read more...]

Modern machine learning platforms like Tensorflow have to date been used mainly by the computer science crowd, for applications like computer vision and language understanding. But as JJ Allaire pointed out in his keynote at the RStudio conference earlier this month (embedded below), there's a wealth of applications in the ... [Read more...]

While ggplot2 (and its various extensions) is often the go-to package for graphics in R these days, if you need to step outside the boundaries of what ggplot2 can do, you can always step back to base R graphics (and the built-in lattice package) and customize to your hearts content. ... [Read more...]

I was genuinely chuffed to get a shout-out in the most recent episode of Not So Standard Deviations, the awesome statistics-and-R themed podcast hosted by Hilary Parker and Roger Peng. In that episode, Roger recounts his recent discovery of the Microsoft ecosystem of tools for R, which he (jokingly) dubbed ... [Read more...]