Nate Silver's departure to relaunch FiveThirtyEight.com left a bit of a hole at the New York Times, which The Upshot — the new data journalism practice at the Times — seeks to fill. And they've gotten off to a great start with the new Senate forecasting model, called Leo. Leo was ... [Read more...]

Norm Matloff points us to a pithy example that sums up Simpson's Paradox perfectly, captured in the title of a medical paper: "Good for Women, Good for Men, Bad for People". He explains how Simpson's Paradox isn't a paradox at all, but just the consequence of including a minor variable ... [Read more...]

If you missed last week's webinar presented by Revolution Analytics' US Chief Scientist Mario Inchiosa, Decision Trees built in Hadoop plus more Big Data Analytics with Revolution R Enterprise, the slides and webinar replay are now available for download. The webinar includes a demo of building decision trees and regression ... [Read more...]

The Mountain View Voice is a weekly newspaper serving the Silicon Valley area, and is a familiar sight to anyone wandering the streets of Palo Alto or Menlo Park. Angela Hey writes for 'Hey Tech!', an online blog of the Voice, and has just published a feature on R ... [Read more...]

A couple of weeks ago, I participated in a panel discussion for DM Radio: "Still Sexy? How's that Data Scientist Gig Working Out?". The title was provocative, but the discussion mostly revolved around the rise of data science and how advanced analytics (often implemented with R) is changing the way ... [Read more...]

As a language for statistical computing, R has always had a bias towards linear algebra, and is optimized for operations dealing in complete vectors and matrixes. This can be surprising to programmers coming to R from lower-level languages, where iterative programming (looping over the elements of a vector or matrix) ... [Read more...]

A new Task View on CRAN will be of anyone who needs to connect R with Web-based applications. The Web Technologies and Services Task View lists R functions and pacakges for reading data from websites (via public APIs or by scraping data from HTML packegs); for interfacing with Cloud-based platforms (... [Read more...]

Here's something fun you can do with R and its interface to Twitter, the TwitteR package. An R script by CMU student Mark Patterson downloads your Twitter profile picture, counts the number of Twitter followers you have, and then creates a pointillist version of your profile picture with as many ... [Read more...]

As announced this morning on mailing list, R 3.1.0 (codenamed "Spring Dance") has been released. The source code is available now; as of this writing binary versions haven't yet appeared on CRAN or propagated to the mirrors, but I expect they'll be available in a day or two. You can check ... [Read more...]

Ari Lamstein has updated his choroplethr package with a new capability for creating animated data maps. I can't embed the animated version here, but click the image below to see an animation of US counties by average household income, from the richest to the poorest by percentile. (The code behind ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from March of particular interest to R users: Francis Smart offers five excellent reasons to use R, and notes that R is the top Google Search for statistical software. Revolution Analytics is offering R training for SAS users in Singapore and ... [Read more...]

FastCompany magazine recently published an in-depth feature on Open Science, with a focus on the R language and the ROpenSci project. If you're not familiar with ROpenSci, the article gives a nice introduction from Ted Hart, a member of the ROpenSci development team: A big sea change was the need ... [Read more...]

I've been spending the week at the Gartner Business Intelligence and Analytics Summit in Las Vegas, and R has been quite prominent here. Of course, R got namechecked several times on the panel about the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics, and several of the regular talks mentioned R as ... [Read more...]

Francis Smart offers five excellent reasons to use R, in a well-researched post ideal for sharing with anyone thinking about making the switch to R. (You might also share this YouTube video for a quick 90-second introduction to R.) The post also includes a novel analysis of interest in R, ... [Read more...]

Revolution Analytics has just introduced a 10-module series of R courses in Singapore. If you'd like to learn how to do data analysis in R, already know data analysis in another language like SAS and want to transition to R, or just want to enhance your R skills in a ... [Read more...]

I'm a big fan of Wes Anderson's movies. I love the quirky characters and stories, the distinctive cinematography, and the unique visual style. Now you can bring some of that style to your own R charts, by making use of these Wes Anderson inspired palettes. Just choose your favourite Wes ... [Read more...]

The fine folks behind the Big Data Journal have just published a new e-book Big Data: Harnessing the Power of Big Data Through Education and Data-Driven Decision Making. (Note: Adobe Flash is required to view the e-book.) In the eBook, you'll find the following technical papers on the topics of ... [Read more...]

Most people know R as a statistics/analytics language for analysis of quantitative data, and don't think of it as a tool for processing raw text. But R actually has some quite powerful facilities for processing character data. And as Gaston Sanchez learned, text manipulation is an important part of ... [Read more...]

If you're still working on your March Madness brackets or fantasy teams, Rodrigo Zamith has updated his NCAA Data Visualizer with the latest teams, players and results. Just choose the two teams you want to compare and the metric to compare them on, and this R-based app will show you ... [Read more...]

If you're a student and you'd like to improve R by developing a new R package for 3 months over the summer — and get paid $5000 by Google in the process — why not apply for an R project in the Google Summer of Code? All you need to do browse the list ... [Read more...]