I owe a big “thank you” to all of you who attended my webinar yesterday “Using R with Hadoop”. Revolution Analytics partnered with us at Think Big Analytics to produce the webinar, and I owe them thanks as well. For those of you who missed it, the slides and replay are now available from Revolution 
Here is my presentation from last night’s Boston Predictive Analytics Meetup graciously hosted by Predictive Analytics World Boston. The talk is meant to provide an overview of (some) of the different ways to get data into R, especially supplementary data sets to assist with your analysis. All code and data files are available at github: 
Slides from the Boston Predictive Analytics Big Data Workshop tutorials:
Big Data Step-by-Step: Infrastructure 1/3: Local VM
Big Data Step-by-Step: Infrastructure 2/3: Running R and RStudio on EC2
Big Data Step-by-Step: Infrastructure 3/3: Taking it to the cloud... easily... with Whirr
Big Data Step-by-Step: Using R & Hadoop (with RHadoop's rmr package)
ggplot2's geom_rect() layer makes it easy to highlight portions of your graph, such as recessions on an economic time series.
R reminds me a lot of English. It’s easy to get started, but very difficult to master. So for all those times I’ve spent… well, forever… trying to figure out the “R way” of doing something, I’m glad to share these quick wins. My recent R tutorial on mining Twitter for consumer sentiment wouldn’t have 
This inaugural post in my "one-liners which make me love R" series highlights the googleVis package which makes it easy to use the Google Visualization API from R. Thanks to googleVis, just one line of R generates the 165 lines of HTML and (mostly) JavaScript required to create a Hans Rosling-style motion chart for some sample data.
Condensed from this post (and comments) on David Chudzicki’s blog, tweaked, and updated for R-2.13.1. Assumes you’re starting with a virgin “Amazon Linux” AMI. I picked “Basic 64-bit Amazon Linux AMI 2011.02.1 Beta” (AMI Id: ami-8e1fece7) because it was marked as free tier eligible on the “Quick Start” tab of AWS’s “Launch Instance” dialog box: 
Update: An expanded version of this tutorial will appear in the new Elsevier book Practical Text Mining and Statistical Analysis for Non-structured Text Data Applications by Gary Miner et. al which is now available for pre-order from Amazon. In conjunction with the book, I have cleaned up the tutorial code and published it on github. 
Downgrade to RJSONIO 0.5 if you want to be able to set initial states with the current googleVis package. Otherwise, there will be lots of extra backslashes in your JavaScript--and blank pages in your browser.
Jeffrey Ryan's quantmod package makes it simple to download and graph pricing data from a variety of sources. A couple of lines of R is all it takes to see that silver has had a very bad week.
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
