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 ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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) [Read more...]

ggplot2's geom_rect() layer makes it easy to highlight portions of your graph, such as recessions on an economic time series. [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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. [Read more...]

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. [Read more...]

For the past few meetings of the Greater Boston useR Group, we have been opened with an introductory “useR Vignette” talk on a topic which may be helpful for new R users. This week, I presented an overview of accessing databases from R. Several people have tweeted and blogged nice ... [Read more...]

Jeffrey Horner's new Rook package provides a new interface for developing R-based web applications. Rook allows the same application to run in R's built-in web server or (soon) in the rApache module. This post shows how easy it is to use the package's Rhttpd class to get started with Rook. [Read more...]

JD Long's experimental segue package makes it easy to use Amazon's Elastic MapReduce service to fire up a Hadoop cluster and use it for non-Big Data, computationally-intensive tasks. The package provides a cluster-aware version of lapply() which "just works". [Read more...]

My first package, zipcode, is now available on CRAN. It contains the CivicSpace database of 43,191 U.S. zip codes. [Read more...]

rggobi is the first package which didn't survive my transition from 32-bit to 64-bit in R 2.11.1. Fortunately, installing the package from source fixes it, and Hadley Wickham has posted the prerequisites and procedure. [Read more...]

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CRAN contains ready-made binary packages for nearly all of its packages, but rgdal is one which I keep finding myself trying to install from source whenever I upgrade R. Compiled versions of rgdal, along with prerequisites and complements like the GDAL framework, GRASS, and even the old FFTW3 can be ... [Read more...]