by Joseph Rickert I recently rediscovered the Timely Portfolio post on R Financial Time Series Plotting. If you are not familiar with this gem, it is well-worth the time to stop and have a look at it now. Not only does it contain some useful examples of time series plots ... [Read more...]

by Ari Lamstein, consultant specializing in software engineering and data analysis and author of the free email course Learn to Map Census Data in R. One of my favorite things about R is that it allows me to follow up on interesting news stories. Consider this interview on EconTalk about ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert One great beauty of the R ecosystem, and perhaps the primary reason for R’s phenomenal growth, is the system for contributing new packages. This, coupled to the rock solid stability of CRAN, R’s primary package repository, gives R a great advantage. However, anyone with enough ... [Read more...]

by Gregory Vandenbrouck Software Engineer, Microsoft This post is the fourth in a series that covers pulling data from Microsoft SQL Server or MySQL/MariaDB on Azure to an R client on Windows or Linux. In the previous posts, we covered pulling data from SQL Server to Windows and from ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert We can declare 2015 the year that R went mainstream at the JSM. There is no doubt about it, the calculations, visualizations and deep thinking of a great many of the world's statisticians are rendered or expressed in R and the JSM is with the program. In 2013 I ... [Read more...]

by Nina Zumel Data Scientist Win-Vector LLC Image by Liz Sullivan, Creative Commons. Source: Wikimedia An all too common approach to modeling in data science is to throw all possible variables at a modeling procedure and "let the algorithm sort it out." This is tempting when you are not sure ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert In a recent post on creating JavaScript network graphs directly from R, my colleague and fellow blogger, Andrie de Vries, included a link to a saved graph of CRAN. Here, I will use that same graph (network) to build a simple exponential random graph model using functions ... [Read more...]

by Peter Hickey (@PeteHaitch) One of the keys to R's success as a software environment for data analysis is the availability of user-contributed packages. Most useRs will be familiar with (and very grateful for) the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN). The packages available on CRAN, nearly 7000 at last count, cover ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert New R packages just keep coming. The following plot, constructed with information from the monthly files on Dirk Eddelbuettel's CRANberries site, shows a plot of the number of new packages released to CRAN between January 1, 2013 and July 27, 2015 by month (not quite 31 months). This is amazing growth! The ... [Read more...]

by John MountData Scientist, Win-Vector LLC R has a number of very good packages for manipulating and aggregating data (plyr, sqldf, RevoScaleR, data.table, and more), but when it comes to accumulating results the beginning R user is often at sea. The... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert The XXXV Sunbelt Conference of the International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA) was held last month at Brighton beach in the UK. (And I am still bummed out that I was not there.) A run of 35 conferences is impressive indeed, but the social network analysts have ... [Read more...]

by Gregory Vandenbrouck Software Engineer, Microsoft This post is the third in a series that covers pulling data from Microsoft SQL Server or MySQL/MariaDB on Azure to an R client on Windows or Linux. In the previous two, we covered pulling data from SQL Server and MySQL/MariaDB to ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert June was a hot month for extreme statistics and R. Not only did we close out the month with useR! 2015, but two small conferences in the middle of the month brought experts together from all over the world to discuss two very difficult areas of statistics that ... [Read more...]

by Ari Lamstein, Software Engineer and Data Analyst Creating an email course for my R packages has significantly increased the number of people who use the packages. It has also reduced the learning curve for the packages and brought me into greater contact with my users. In this post I ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert Last week, I was fortunate enough to attend the R Summit & Workshop, an invitation only event, held at the Copenhagen Business School. The abstracts for the public talks presented are online and well worth a look. Collectively they provide a snapshot of the state of development of ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert The installr package has some really nice functions for working with the daily package download logs for the RStudio CRAN mirror which RStudio graciously makes available at http://cran-logs.rstudio.com/. The following code uses the download_RStudio_CRAN_data() function to download a month's worth of .... [Read more...]

by Sean Wells, Senior Software Engineer, Microsoft and David Russell DeployR exists to solve a number of fundamental R analytics integration problems faced by application developers. For example, have you ever wondered how you might execute an R script from within a Web-based dashboard, an enterprise middleware solution, or a ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert It is incredibly challenging to keep up to date with R packages. As of today (6/16/15), there are 6,789 listed on CRAN. Of course, the CRAN Task Views are probably the best resource for finding what's out there. A tremendous amount of work goes into maintaining and curating these ... [Read more...]

by B. W. Lewis This note warns about potentially misleading results when using the use=pairwise.complete.obs and related options in R’s cor and cov functions. Pitfalls are illustrated using a very simple pathological example followed by a brief list of alternative ways to deal with missing data ... [Read more...]

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