by Joseph Rickert Early October: somewhere the leaves are turning brilliant colors, temperatures are cooling down and that back to school feeling is in the air. And for more people than ever before, it is going to seem to be a good time to commit to really learning R. I ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert I have been a big fan of R user groups since I attended my first meeting. There is just something about the vibe of being around people excited about what they are doing that feels good. From a speaker's perspective, presenting at an R user Group meeting ... [Read more...]

by Bob Horton Microsoft Senior Data Scientist Learning curves are an elaboration of the idea of validating a model on a test set, and have been widely popularized by Andrew Ng’s Machine Learning course on Coursera. Here I present a simple simulation that illustrates this idea. Imagine you use ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert This week, the Infrastructure Steering Committee (ISC) of the R Consortium unanimously elected Hadley Wickham as its chair thereby also giving Hadley a seat on the R Consortium board of directors. Congratulations Hadley!! This is a major step forward towards putting the R Consortium in business. Not ... [Read more...]

by John Mount (more articles) and Nina Zumel (more articles). In this article we conclude our four part series on basic model testing. When fitting and selecting models in a data science project, how do you know that your final model is good? And how sure are you that it's ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert In a recent post focused on plotting time series with the new dygraphs package, I did not show how easy it is to read financial data into R. However, in a thoughtful comment to the post, Achim Zeileis pointed out a number of features built into the ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert We are very pleased to announce that Microsoft will not only continue the Revolution Analytics’ tradition of supporting R user groups worldwide, but is expanding the scope of the user group program. The new 2016 Microsoft Data Science User Group Sponsorship Program is open to all user groups ... [Read more...]

by John Mount (more articles) and Nina Zumel (more articles) When fitting and selecting models in a data science project, how do you know that your final model is good? And how sure are you that it's better than the models that you rejected? In this Part 2 of our four ... [Read more...]

by John Mount (more articles) and Nina Zumel (more articles) of Win-Vector LLC "Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful." George Box Here's a caricature of a data science project: your company or client needs information (usually to make a decision). Your job is to build a model ... [Read more...]

by Antony Unwin University of Augsburg, Germany David Moore's definition of data: numbers that have been given a context. Here is some context for the finch dataset: Fig 1: Illustrations of the beaks of four of Darwin's finches from "The Voyage of the Beagle". Note that only one of these (fortis) ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert I recently rediscovered the Timely Portfolio post on R Financial Time Series Plotting. If you are not familiar with this gem, it is well-worth the time to stop and have a look at it now. Not only does it contain some useful examples of time series plots ... [Read more...]

by Ari Lamstein, consultant specializing in software engineering and data analysis and author of the free email course Learn to Map Census Data in R. One of my favorite things about R is that it allows me to follow up on interesting news stories. Consider this interview on EconTalk about ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert One great beauty of the R ecosystem, and perhaps the primary reason for R’s phenomenal growth, is the system for contributing new packages. This, coupled to the rock solid stability of CRAN, R’s primary package repository, gives R a great advantage. However, anyone with enough ... [Read more...]

by Gregory Vandenbrouck Software Engineer, Microsoft This post is the fourth in a series that covers pulling data from Microsoft SQL Server or MySQL/MariaDB on Azure to an R client on Windows or Linux. In the previous posts, we covered pulling data from SQL Server to Windows and from ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert We can declare 2015 the year that R went mainstream at the JSM. There is no doubt about it, the calculations, visualizations and deep thinking of a great many of the world's statisticians are rendered or expressed in R and the JSM is with the program. In 2013 I ... [Read more...]

by Nina Zumel Data Scientist Win-Vector LLC Image by Liz Sullivan, Creative Commons. Source: Wikimedia An all too common approach to modeling in data science is to throw all possible variables at a modeling procedure and "let the algorithm sort it out." This is tempting when you are not sure ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert In a recent post on creating JavaScript network graphs directly from R, my colleague and fellow blogger, Andrie de Vries, included a link to a saved graph of CRAN. Here, I will use that same graph (network) to build a simple exponential random graph model using functions ... [Read more...]

by Peter Hickey (@PeteHaitch) One of the keys to R's success as a software environment for data analysis is the availability of user-contributed packages. Most useRs will be familiar with (and very grateful for) the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN). The packages available on CRAN, nearly 7000 at last count, cover ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert New R packages just keep coming. The following plot, constructed with information from the monthly files on Dirk Eddelbuettel's CRANberries site, shows a plot of the number of new packages released to CRAN between January 1, 2013 and July 27, 2015 by month (not quite 31 months). This is amazing growth! The ... [Read more...]

by John MountData Scientist, Win-Vector LLC R has a number of very good packages for manipulating and aggregating data (plyr, sqldf, RevoScaleR, data.table, and more), but when it comes to accumulating results the beginning R user is often at sea. The... [Read more...]