Tableau runs R scripts using RServe, a free, open-source R package. But if you have a large number of users on Tableau Server and use R scripts heavily, pointing Tableau to a single RServe instance may not be sufficient. Luckily you can use a load-balancer to distribute the load across ...

Presidential election campaigns are heating up and you all know what that means. Word clouds? I still remember visualizations summarizing Romney-Obama debates in 2012 but one thing that slightly bothered me back then was that almost everything I saw were just counting single words so even the one of the most ...

Correspondence analysis is an exploratory data analysis method for discovering relationships between two or more categorical variables. It is very often used for visualizing survey data since if the matrix is large enough (which could be due to large number of variables but also possible with small number of variables ...

Tableau provides a good set of trend line, reference line and band options but sometimes you want to overlay curves based on a custom equation. Logistic regression curves, sine curves, quantile regression curves…. And want these overlay curves to be smooth… This is very easy to do by taking advantage ...

Since version 8.0 it is very easy to generate forecasts in Tableau using exponential smoothing. But in some cases you may want to enrich your forecasts with external variables. For example you may have the government’s forecast for population growth, your own hiring plans, upcoming holidays*, planned marketing activities… which ...

Whether it is forecasting your quarterly sales or comparing historical data, working with time series data is big part of business analytics. Sometimes patterns are easy to see, while in others they might be elusive especially when comparing different time series with short/frequent cyclical patterns. A common question could ...

Clustering is a very common data mining task and has a wide variety of applications from customer segmentation to grouping of text documents. K-means clustering was one of the examples I used on my blog post introducing R integration back in Tableau 8.1. Many others in Tableau community wrote similar articles ...

Two of my favorite new Tableau blogs are “Data * Science + R” and “Data + Science”. Former is a great resource if you want to learn how to leverage R inside Tableau by walking through sample use cases. Examples are interesting and very thoroughly explained. This year’s first post was about ...