Earlier this month TechCrunch published an article of mine, "The Business Economics And Opportunity Of Open-Source Data Science". With this article I wanted to share how open-source software has disrupted the economics of doing business, now that data is a fundamental component of every businesses' operations. Open source projects like ... [Read more...]

Today is my 11th wedding anniversary with my wonderful husband Jay, so it's a love-themed Friday post today. Jay and I met before Facebook was a thing, but we've been touched by the congratulations on our timelines today. Those timeline posts reveal a lot about you and your relationships, and ... [Read more...]

R is coming to SQL Server. SQL Server 2016 (which will be in public preview this summer) will include new real-time analytics, automatic data encryption, and the ability to run R within the database itself: For deeper insights into data, SQL Server 2016 expands its scope beyond transaction processing, data warehousing and ... [Read more...]

Computerworld's Sharon Machlis published today a very useful list of R packages that every R user should know. The list covers packages for data import, data wrangling, data visualization and package development, but for beginning R users the biggest challenge is usually just dealing with data. To that end, I ... [Read more...]

KDnuggets is once again running its annual poll of data science software tools, now in its 16th year. If you'd like to participate, visit the KDnuggets poll page and answer the question, "What Predictive Analytics, Data Mining, Data Science software/tools you used in the past 12 months?". The poll allows ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from April of particular interest to R users. Joseph Rickert reviews the inaugural New York City R User Conference, featuring Andrew Gelman. Engineer Vineet Abraham compares performance benchmarks for R and Revolution R Open on OS X and Ubuntu. R was ... [Read more...]

Arthur Charpentier was trying to solve an interesting problem with R: given this data set of random walks in the 2-D plane, what is the likely origin of a pathway that ends in the black circle below? It's pretty easy to generate random data like this with a few lines ... [Read more...]

Since 2009, it has been possible to call R from SAS programs. However, this integration requires IML, an add-on matrix-object language for SAS which isn't available with all SAS installations and is separate from the standard SAS PROC execution model. Now, engineers at SAS have shared a method of calling R, ... [Read more...]

Revolution R Open 8.0.3 is now available for download for Windows, OS X, Red Hat, Ubuntu and OpenSUSE. This release includes seveal new features: it upgrades RRO to the R 3.1.3 engine, which adds several new features to the R language, adds support for Ubuntu 15.04, and updates the checkpoint package for reproducibility. ... [Read more...]

Bay Area engineer Vineet Abraham recently ran some benchmarks for Revolution R Open (RRO) running on Mac OS X and on Ubuntu. Thanks to the multi-threaded processing capabilites of RRO, several operations ran much faster than R downloaded from CRAN, without having to change any code: For the most part, ... [Read more...]

Build 2015, the Microsoft conference which brings around 5,000 developers to the Moscone Center in San Francisco, begins tomorrow. The conference is sold out, but you can livestream the keynote presentations from buildwindows.com to catch all the big announcements. You can also follow along on Twitter at the #Build2015 hashtag. There ... [Read more...]

One of the great things about R is that there's so much available to use with it: there are several interfaces to choose from, thousands of add-on packages to extend its capabilites, hundreds of books and on-line tutorials — an abundance of riches to improve your R experience. But with that ... [Read more...]

While movies have been getting more orange with time, painting have been going the other direction. Paintings today are generally more blue than they were a few hundred years ago. The image above shows the color spectrum of almost 100,000 paintings created since 1800. Martin Bellander used R to create the image, ... [Read more...]

Are you a talented software engineer who would like to build out the R ecosystem and help more companies access the power of R? Microsoft (Revolution Analytics' parent) is hiring a new team to do just that: Our mission is to empower enterprises to easily and cost-effectively build high-scale analytics ... [Read more...]

The FT Data section of the Financial Times now has a neat interactive unemployment tracker (free but onerous registration required) that lets you explore employment rates and trends in EU member countries from 2004-2013: The graphic was created by FT Data Journalist John-Burn Murdoch with R. To automate the process ... [Read more...]

The R Core Team announced yesterday that the latest update to R, R 3.2.0 (codename: "Full of Ingredients") is now available. As of this writing the source bundle is available for download, but Mac and Windows binaries aren't yet available. You should be able to download them from your local CRAN ... [Read more...]

R is already in use in well over 100 cities around the world, and now we can add another to the list: Yangon, Myanmar. Ben Marwick is a trainer with Software Carpentry (a non-profit organization devoted to improving basic computing skills among researchers in science, engineering, medicine, and other disciplines), and ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from March of particular interest to R users. Overview of "Targeted learning" packages for R, including SuperLearner and tmle. The 7 most common R error messages, by frequency of mentions on StackOverflow. Slides and a webinar replay on reproducible data analysis with ... [Read more...]

Hadley Wickham and the RStudio team have created some new packages for R, which will be very useful for anyone who needs to read data into R (that is, everyone). The readr package provides functions for reading text data into R, and the readxl package provides functions for reading Excel ... [Read more...]

In today's data-oriented world, just about every retailer has amassed a huge database of purchase transaction. Each transaction consists of a number of products that have been purchased together. A natural question that you could answer from this database is: What products are typically purchased together? This is called Market ... [Read more...]