President Trump's State of the Union speech was last night, and it seemed to me it dragged on a bit. That's because it was apparently the slowest SOTU speech in history, based on average number of words spoken per minute. The chart below, based on these data, was created by ... [Read more...]

This past weekend I attended the R User Day at Data Day Texas in Austin. It was a great event, mainly because so many awesome people from the R community came to give some really interesting talks. Lucy D’Agostino McGowan has kindly provided a list of the talks and ... [Read more...]

I'm a big fan using R to simulate data. When I'm trying to understand a data set, my first step is sometimes to simulate data from a model and compare the results to the data, before I go down the path of fitting an analytical model directly. Simulations are easy ... [Read more...]

If you're an organizer of an R-focused meetup group, or are planning a community-led R conference, the 2018 R Consortium R User Group Support Program is now accepting applications for sponsorship. The 2017 program funded 76 user groups and 3 small conferences, and the program is expanding further in 2018. User groups now also receive ... [Read more...]

In what is rapidly becoming a series — cool things you can do with R in a tweet — Julia Silge demonstrates scraping the list of members of the US house of representatives on Wikipedia in just 5 R statements: library(rvest) library(tidyverse) h % html_node("#mw-content-text __ div __ table:nth-child(18)") %__% html_table() ... [Read more...]

Strava is a fitness app that records you activities, including the routes of your walks, rides and runs. The service also provides an API that allows you to extract all of your data for analysis. University of Melbourne research fellow Marcus Volz created an R package to download and visualize ... [Read more...]

Registration is now open for useR! 2018, the official R user conference to be held in Brisbane, Australia July 10-13. If you haven't been to a useR! conference before, it's a fantastic opportunity to meet and mingle with other R users from around the world, see talks on R packages and ... [Read more...]

Microsoft R Open (MRO), Microsoft's enhanced distribution of open source R, has been upgraded to version 3.4.3 and is now available for download for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This update upgrades the R language engine to the latest R (version 3.4.3) and updates the bundled packages (specifically: checkpoint, curl, doParallel, foreach, and ... [Read more...]

The SparklyR package from RStudio provides a high-level interface to Spark from R. This means you can create R objects that point to data frames stored in the Spark cluster and apply some familiar R paradigms (like dplyr) to the data, all the while leveraging Spark's distributed architecture without having ... [Read more...]

If you've ever wondered how neural networks work behind the scenes, check out this guide to implementing neural networks in scratch with R, by David Selby. You may be surprised how with just a little linear algebra and a few R functions, you can train a function that classifies the ... [Read more...]

The R language surged to 8th place in the 2017 TIOBE language rankings, up 8 places from a year before. Fellow data science language language Python also saw an increase in rankings, taking the 4th spot (one ahead of its January 2016 ranking). (Click the table for the current top 20 rankings.) TIOBE ranks ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from December of particular interest to R users. Hadley Wickham's Shiny app for making eggnog. Using R to analyze the vocal range of pop singers. A video tour of the data.table package from its creator, Matt Dowle. The European R ... [Read more...]

One of the most powerful things about R is the ecosystem that has emerged around it. In addition to the R language itself and the many packages that extend it, you have a network of users, developers, governance bodies, software vendors and service providers that provide resources in technical information ... [Read more...]

by [Błażej Moska](https://www.linkedin.com/in/b%C5%82a%C5%BCej-moska-9a316113a/), computer science student and data science intern Got stuck with too large a dataset? R speed drives you mad? Divide, parallelize and go with Rcpp! One of the frustrating moments while working with ... [Read more...]

There are lots of tricks you can use to make R code run faster: use more efficient data structures; vectorize your R code; offload complex data management tasks to databases. Emily Robinson shares many of these R performance tips in a case study on A/B testing for Etsy. The ... [Read more...]

RStudio's Jenny Bryan (whose recent interviews here and here you should definitely check out) has some excellent advice for improving your workflow for R: Use. Projects. — @JennyBryan at #EARLConf2017 #rstats pic.twitter.com/r4a08JhWHT — David Smith (@revodavid) September 13, 2017 If you're you're routinely using setwd to manually change R's ... [Read more...]

The Revolutions team is celebrating Christmas today, and we're taking a break with family and enjoying good food. And given the number of Eggnogs that are being prepared — thanks to Hadley Wickham's eggnogr Shiny app — it might be a good idea to take the rest of the week off as ... [Read more...]

Sure, this is a promo for a movie, but I'd love to have a full-length single of this: Relatedly, if you want to settle an argument about which pop diva has the greatest vocal range, Giora Simchoni used R to perform frequency analysis of their hits: That's all from us ... [Read more...]

The data.table package provides a high-performance interface for querying and manipulating data tables (a close cousin of data frames). In the video below (recorded at the H2OWorld conference), creator Matt Dowle gives a tour of the package and provides several examples of its use. If you'd like to ... [Read more...]

The main international R user conference, useR!, is typically hosted in Europe every other year. Back in 2016 when useR! was held in the USA, an alternative conference was held in Poland. Next year (when the useR! conference will be in Australia) the tradition continues, and the 2018 eRum (European R Users ... [Read more...]