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...]

CARE International is a humanitarian organization that is leading the charge to fight poverty around the world, with a focus on empowering women and girls. On March 28 in Atlanta, CARE is teaming up with Booz Allen Hamilton, Emory University's Rollins School of Public Health and Revolution Analytics to bring data ... [Read more...]

In June 2013, the conflict between opposition and government forces around the Syrian city of Aleppo had intensified. Rockets struck residential districts, and car-bombs exploded near key facilities. Many people died. But as is common in conflict areas, the reports of the number of dead varied by the source of the ... [Read more...]

The worldwide R user conference, useR! 2014, will take in Los Angeles, June 30-July 3. If you're an R user, or just interested in learning about what R can do first-hand from members of the R community, this is the conference to attend. To get an idea of what to expect, check ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from February of particular interest to R users: A statistical analysis of various forecasting methods (using R) leads to correct predictions for 21 of 24 Oscars awards. There are now 123 R User Groups worldwide, and applications for Revolution Analytics sponsorship grants are open ... [Read more...]

R-core member Peter Dalgaard announced yesterday that R 3.0.3 is now available. This is the final update to the R 3.0 series, and includes several small but handy new features and minor bug fixes. Improvements include support for writing very large tables to disk, better handling of foreign-language calendar dates, and more ... [Read more...]

Since we've had quite a few announcements over the last month or so, I thought I'd take a moment to catch up on some of the media reports mentioning Revolution Analytics. Last week, Gartner revealed Revolution Analytics as a Visionary in the new Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics Platforms. Inside ... [Read more...]

This is the time of year when everyone likes to speculate on the winners of the Academy Awards, to be announced on Sunday. There are plenty of ways to try and predict which movie is going to win Best Picture or who'll win Best Actress. You could look at the ... [Read more...]

The entire team at Revolution Analytics is very proud to announce that Gartner has named Revolution Analytics a Visionary in the inaugural Gartner Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics Platforms, published February 19, 2014. The report evaluated 16 vendors through a series of stringent criteria related to the ability to execute and completeness of ... [Read more...]

In the video below from The Atlantic, the differences in the way US citizens describe or pronounce various things is illustrated in a series of phone calls (via Sullivan): If you're wondering how your dialect fits in, you can try the New York Times Dialect Quiz. Answer 25 questions, and it ... [Read more...]

Graham Williams is the Lead Data Scientist at the Australian Taxation Office, and the creator of Rattle, an open-source GUI for data mining with R. (Check out some recent reviews/demos of Rattle on this blog here and here.) Dr Williams continues his many contributions to the R community with ... [Read more...]

A recent feature article in The Atlantic describes the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how researchers "conduct sophisticated data analyses using cloud resources such as Amazon Web Services and R, an open source application for statistic... [Read more...]

If you missed our recent webinar Creating Value that Scales, you missed out on a live demonstration of the big-data analytics of Revolution R Enterprise embedded in the drag-and-drop visual workflow interface of Alteryx. If you want to see how a decision-maker can use the results of workflows created by ... [Read more...]

Looking for a sweet gift for your data-loving significant other? Then check out these statistical distribution plushies on Etsy: Availale in pink (log-Normal distribution), yellow (chi-square distribution), light green (Normal distribution), baby blue (T-distribution), and lilac (uniform distribution). They're cute, they're educational, last longer than roses and much better for ... [Read more...]

The BitCoin cryptocurrency has been much in the news of late. What, you don't have BitCoins? (Don't worry, neither do I.) Unless you have a supercomputer in your back yard and a cheap source of power, it's no longer really feasible to mine them yourself. But if you want some, ... [Read more...]

Two recent salary surveys have shown that R language skills attract median salaries in excess of $110,000 in the United States. In the 2014 Dice Tech Salary Survey of over 17,000 technology professionals, the highest-paid IT skill was R programming. While big-data skills in general featured strongly in the top tier, having R ... [Read more...]

There's no shortage of web sites listing the current medal standings at Sochi, not least the official Winter Olympics Medal Tally. And here's the same tally, rendered with R: Click through to see a real-time version of the chart, created with RStudio's Shiny by Ramnath Vaidyanathan. (By the way, does ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from January of particular interest to R users: Princeton’s Germán Rodríguez has published a useful “Introduction to R” guide, with a focus on linear and logistic regression. The rxDForest function in the RevoScaleR package fits random forests of ... [Read more...]