The latest version of R from the R Project, R 2.11.0, is now available in source code form. Binaries for Windows, Mac and Linux will appear in your local CRAN mirror in the next few days. Some new features include: Support for rendering bitmap images in graphics devices, via a new function rasterImage() The new function vapply is like...
Blog Archives
Why use R? Because that’s what the pros use
I had the great pleasure of sitting down for a beer with Steve O'Grady (from the open-source analyst group RedMonk), at the MySQL conference last week. It was great to get the perspective of someone who knows the tech industry so well, sees predictive analytics as a hot area, and is taking an active interest in statistics and R...
Data I/O performance tips
The R tag on StackOverflow recently topped 1000 questions, and continues to be a great community resource for practical tips on using the R language for data analysis and visualization. To take one example, "Efficiency of operations on R data structures" has been answered with some great tips on efficiently getting data in and out of the R system....
R and the Next Big Thing
I've been travelling for the past few days (for the R/Finance 2010 conference in Chicago), so I'd missed much of the reaction to AnnMaria De Mars' article last week where she claimed that "R is an epic fail". Understandably, that inflammatory statement provoked many reactions from the R community on Twitter and in the blogosphere. (I suspect the fact...
Because it’s Friday: When infographics go bad
Phil Gyford laments crappy infographics swamping the good: Phil Gyford on Flickr: Infographic (used under Creative Commons license)
Saving the world with R
Tuesday's meeting of the Bay Area R UseR Group at the LinkedIn offices was a great event. The headline speaker was Joe Adler, author of the excellent R reference manual, R in a Nutshell. Joe's presentation was an in-depth look at the relative speed of various options in R for looking up values from a key in a key-value...
Slides from High-Performance Analytics webinar now available
Thanks to everyone who attended the webinar I presented this morning, High-Performance Analytics with REvolution R and Windows HPC Server. My slides are now available for download at the link below; even if you're not using Windows, I hope the slides are a useful introduction to the foreach parallel programming construct in general. If you do use R on...
In case you missed it: March Roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from last month of particular interest to R users. We reviewed a special report in The Economist on the "Data Deluge" and the growing importance of statistical analysis in business. One section mentioned R specifically. We announced that Zack Urlocker, formerly responsible for engineering and marketing for the open-source database...
Arizona court rules statistical sampling is legal
A court in Arizona has ruled that statistical sampling is legal for determining damages awarded to individual claimants when there are thousands of similar cases to be assessed simultaneously. In a case where 30,000 claims were filed Maricopa County, AZ by hospitals for improper reimbursement, the trial judge appointed a former judge as a special master in the case...
Because it’s Friday: Pixels invade New York
Posted for no other reason than it warms my gamer-geek heart to see NYC taken over by 8-bit video game characters. The Tetris sequence is particularly cool. Update: The original video was deleted from YouTube, I'm guessing because of copyright issues with the music. This version has no music. (Thanks to reader MB in the comments for the heads-up.)
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
