by Le Zhang (Data Scientist, Microsoft) and Graham Williams (Director of Data Science, Microsoft) Employee retention has been and will continue to be one of the biggest challenges of a company. While classical tactics such as promotion, competitive perks, etc. are practiced as ways to retain employees, it is now ... [Read more...]

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by Le Zhang (Data Scientist, Microsoft) and Graham Williams (Director of Data Science, Microsoft) In data science, to develop a model with optimal performance, exploratory experiments on different sets of hyper-parameters are often performed. Preliminary analyses on smaller data can be performed on a single machine, while the experimental one ... [Read more...]

by Wee Hyong Tok, Senior Data Scientist Manager at Microsoft How do you read a novel in record time, and gain insights into the emotional journey of main characters, as they go through various trials and tribulations, as an exciting story unfolds from chapter to chapter? I remembered my experiences ... [Read more...]

by Bob Horton, Microsoft Senior Data Scientist Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves are a popular way to visualize the tradeoffs between sensitivitiy and specificity in a binary classifier. In an earlier post, I described a simple “turtle’s eye view” of these plots: a classifier is used to sort cases ... [Read more...]

by Lixun Zhang (Data Scientist), Ye Xing (Senior Data Scientist) and Tao Wu (Principal Data Scientist Manager), all at Microsoft Editor's Note: To learn more about migrating from SAS to R, there will be a live webinar presented by Lixun and Ye tomorrow (Tuesday, November 15). Register to attend the webinar ... [Read more...]

by Ali Zaidi, Data Scientist at Microsoft # Apache Spark and a Tale of APIs Spark is an exceptionally popular processing engine for distributed data. Dealing with data in distributed storage and programming with concurrent systems often requires learning complicated new paradigms and techniques. Statisticans and data scientists familiar wtih R ... [Read more...]

by Graham Williams, Director of Data Science, Microsoft Programming is an art and a way we express ourselves. As we write our programs we should keep in mind that someone else is very likely to be reading it. We can facilitate the accessibility of our programs through a clear presentation ... [Read more...]

by Srini Kumar, Director of Data Science at Microsoft We tend to think of R and other such ML tools only in the context of the workplace, to do “weighty” things aimed at saving millions. A little judicious use of R may help us hugely in our personal lives too. ... [Read more...]

by Udayan Kumar, Data Scientist at Microsoft Beginning in 2016, Microsoft rolled out a preview of Microsoft R Server (MRS) for Azure HDInsight clusters. This service provides a preconfigured instance of R server with Spark/Hadoop that can be provisioned within minutes. Recent blog posts (by Max Kaznady and David Smith) ... [Read more...]

by Brandon Rohrer, Principal Data Scientist, Microsoft R or Python? Torch or TensorFlow? (or MXNet or CNTK)? Spark or map-reduce? When we're getting started on a project, the mountain of tools to choose from can be overwhelming. Sometimes it makes me feel small and bewildered, like Alice in Wonderland. Luckily, ... [Read more...]

by Jaya Mathew, Data Scientist at Microsoft By using R Services within SQL Server 2016, users can leverage the power of R at scale without having to move their data around. Such a solution is beneficial for organizations with very sensitive, big data which cannot be hosted on any public cloud ... [Read more...]

Wouldn't it be great if there was a way to harness the familiarity and usability of a tool like R, and at the same time take advantage of the performance and scalability benefits of in-database/in-Hadoop computation? We're happy to announce PivotalR, a package that translates R code into SQL ... [Read more...]