Articles by David Smith

A few podcast recommendations

April 5, 2018 | David Smith

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...]

Mathematical art in R

April 3, 2018 | David Smith

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...]

BotRNot: An R app to detect Twitter bots

March 29, 2018 | David Smith

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...]

Generate image captions with the Computer Vision API

March 27, 2018 | David Smith

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...]

The most prolific package maintainers on CRAN

March 22, 2018 | David Smith

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...]

R and Docker

March 20, 2018 | David Smith

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 released

March 15, 2018 | David Smith

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 it: February 2018 roundup

March 14, 2018 | David Smith

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...]

R rises to #12 in Redmonk language rankings

March 13, 2018 | David Smith

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...]

R data concepts, for Excel users

March 7, 2018 | David Smith

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...]

Choosing Priors: Double-Yolk Bayesian Egg

March 6, 2018 | David Smith

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...]

New releases: Microsoft R Client 3.4.3, Microsoft ML Server 9.3

February 27, 2018 | David Smith

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...]

How to set up a sparklyr cluster in 5 minutes

February 23, 2018 | David Smith

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...]

Analyzing accelerometer data with R

February 22, 2018 | David Smith

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...]

Machine Learning in R with TensorFlow

February 21, 2018 | David Smith

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...]

A fresh look for base graphics

February 15, 2018 | David Smith

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...]

What does Microsoft do with R?

February 13, 2018 | David Smith

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...]
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