The winners of the American Statistical Association Police Data Challenge have been announced. The ASA teamed up with the Police Data Initiative, which provides open data from local law enforcement agencies in the US, to create a competition for high school and college students to analyze crime data from Baltimore, ... [Read more...]

R has been available for Windows since the very beginning, but if you have a Windows machine and want to use R within a Linux ecosystem, that's easy to do with the new Fall Creator's Update (version 1709). If you need access to the gcc toolchain for building R packages, or ... [Read more...]

A movie is said to satisfy the Bechdel Test if it satisfies the following three criteria: The movie has at least two named female characters ... who have a conversation with each other ... about something other than a man The website BechdelTest.com scores movies accordingly, granting one point for each ... [Read more...]

A quick personal note: today is my first day as a member of the Cloud Developer Advocates team at Microsoft! I'll still be blogging and events related to R, and supporting the R community, but now I'll be doing it as a member of a team dedicated to community outreach. ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from November of particular interest to R users. R 3.4.3 "Kite Eating Tree" has been released. Several approaches for generating a "Secret Santa" list with R. The "RevoScaleR" package from Microsoft R Server has now been ported to Python. The call for ... [Read more...]

The British Ecological Society has published a new volume in their Guides to Better Science series: A Guide to Reproducible Code in Ecology and Evolution (pdf). The introduction, by , describes its scope: A Guide to Reproducible Code covers all the basic tools and information you will need to start making ... [Read more...]

Whether we're developing statistical models, training machine learning recognizers, or developing AI systems, we start with data. And while the suitability of that data set is, lamentably, sometimes measured by its size, it's always important to reflect on where those data come from. Data are not neutral: the data we ... [Read more...]

If you'd like to learn how you use R to develop AI applications, the Microsoft AI School now features a learning path focused on Microsoft R and SQL Server ML Services. This learning path includes eight modules, each comprising detailed tutorials and examples: Doing Data Analysis using R Analyzing Big ... [Read more...]

Last month the Australian people signaled their approval of legalizing same-sex marriage by a 62%:38% margin in a national survey. (On a personal note, I was elated and relieved by the result: my husband and I have discussed eventually retiring to Australia, and with this decision our marriage would be recognized ... [Read more...]

R 3.4.3 has been released, as announced by the R Core team today. As of this writing, only the source distribution (for those that build R themselves) is available, but binaries for Windows, Mac and Linux should appear on your local CRAN mirror within the next day or so. This is ... [Read more...]

Several recent blog posts have explored the Secret Santa problem and provided solutions in R. This post provides a roundup of various solutions and how they are implemented in R. If you wanted to set up a "Secret Santa" gift exchange at the office, you could put everyone's name into ... [Read more...]

The tenth annual R/Finance conference will be held in Chicago, June 1-2 2018. This is a fantastic conference for anyone working with R in the finance industry, or doing research around R in finance in the academic sector. This community-led, single-track conference always features a program of interesting talks in ... [Read more...]

Today is Thanksgiving Day here in the US, so we're taking the rest of the week off to enjoy the time with family. Even if you don't celebrate Thanksgiving, today is still an excellent day to give thanks to the volunteers who have contributed to the R project and its ... [Read more...]

by Angela Li, founder and organizer of R-Ladies Chicago. This article also appears on Angela's personal blog. It’s been a few months since I launched R-Ladies Chicago, so I thought I’d sit down and write up some things that I’ve learned in the course of organizing this ... [Read more...]

Twitter recently doubled the maximum length of a tweet to 280 characters, and while all users now have access to longer tweets, few have taken advantage of the opportunity. Bob Rudis used the rtweet package to analyze tweets sent with the #rstats hashtag since 280-char tweets were introduced, and most still ... [Read more...]

Connect();, the annual Microsoft developer conference, is wrapping up now in New York. The conference was the venue for a number of major announcements and talks. Here are some highlights related to data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence: There have been several updates to Azure Machine Learning, including the ... [Read more...]

Among the many interesting talks I saw a the Domino Data Science Pop-Up in Chicago earlier this week was the presentation by Gene Lynes and Nick Lucius from the City of Chicago. The City of Chicago Tech Plan encourages smart communities and open government, and as part of that initiative ... [Read more...]

MRAN, the Microsoft R Application Network has been migrated to a new high-performance, high-availability server, and we've taken the opportunity to make a few upgrades along the way. You shouldn't notice any breaking changes (of course if you do, please let us know), but you should notice faster performance for ... [Read more...]

There are many R packages that connect to the internet, whether it's to import data (readr), install packages from Github (devtools), connect with cloud services (AzureML), or many other web-connected tasks. There's one R package in particular that provides the underlying connection between R and the Web: curl, by Jeroen ... [Read more...]

Modern slot machines (fruit machine, pokies, or whatever those electronic gambling devices are called in your part of the world) are designed to be addictive. They're also usually quite complicated, with a bunch of features that affect the payout of a spin: multiple symbols with different pay scales, wildcards, scatter ... [Read more...]