If you want to get a quick numerical summary of a data set, the summary function gives a nice overview for data frames: __ require(ggplot2) Loading required package: ggplot2 __ data(diamonds) __ summary(diamonds) carat cut color clarity depth table Min. :0.2000 Fair : 1610 D: 6775 SI1 :13065 Min. :43.00 Min. :43.00 1st Qu.:0.4000 Good : 4906 E: 9797 VS2 :12258 1... [Read more...]

R user Arthur Charpentier attempts to use the raster library and R functions to find Waldo in a "Where's Waldo" image: Sadly, it turned out that Waldo was a bit too tricky to spot using these techniques. But Arthur did have more success identifying the US flag in a shot ... [Read more...]

The open-source RHadoop project makes it easier to extract data from Hadoop for analysis with R, and to run R within the nodes of the Hadoop cluster -- essentially, to transform Hadoop into a massively-parallel statistical computing cluster based on R. In yesterday's webinar (the replay of which is embedded ... [Read more...]

With more than 5,000 R packages now available (from the CRAN and BioConductor repositories), for any statistical or data analysis procedure you can confidently say, "there's a package for that". To make it easier for SAS and SPSS users to find what they need in R, Bob Muenchen has updated his ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

Ted Harding posed an interesting puzzle challenge on the r-help mailing list recently. Here's the puzzle: Take the numbers 1, 2, 3, etc. up to 17. Can you write out all seventeen numbers in a line so that every pair of numbers that are next to each other, adds up to give a square ... [Read more...]

R has some very powerful built-in features for working with dates, times, and time-zones. But power and flexibility rarely correlate with ease-of-use, and this is no exception. The lubridate package comes to the rescue, make things a bit easier when working with chronological data in R. The paper Dates and ... [Read more...]

Hadley Wickham has just released an update to the ggplot2 graphics package for R. Version 0.9.0 significantly speeds up the process of rendering graphics, and the documentation is much improved (including the addition of many new examples). This update also adds a bunch of new features, which are documented in this 40... [Read more...]

Revolution Analytics' open-source RHadoop project, which provides integration between R and Hadoop, has been updated with the release of version 1.2 of the "rmr" package. New in this version: support for binary I/O formats, which improves on the text-only interfact by allowing use of faster and more space-efficient data formats ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

A few days ago, Romain François explained how to interface with the Facebook Graph API explorer with R. This was a low-level interface, giving the R programmer the ability to the raw data that Facebook can provide about your connections. Now, just four days later, the first application in ... [Read more...]

The RInside package provides C++ classes that make it easier to embed R in C++ code on many platforms. According to a post from package co-maintainer Dirk Eddelbuettel, the package has just been updated to version 0.2.6 with improved support on Windows, and compatibility with R's standard random number generator. You ... [Read more...]

The December 2011 issue of the R Journal is now available for download. Three times a year, the open-access journal of the R project publishes peer-reviewed articles on research and applications of R and R packages. As of the latest issue, all articles are published under a Creative Commons license, making ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

[Read more...]

The good folks at DataMarket have posted a new tutorial on using the rdatamarket package (covered here in August) to easily download public data sets into R for analysis. The tutorial describes how to install the rdatamarket package, how to extract metadata for data sets, and how to download the ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

For anyone who wants to estimate linear or nonlinear mixed-effects models (aka random-effects models, hierarchical models or multilevel models) using the R language, the Quantum Forest blog has several recent posts that will be of interest. Written by Luis Apiolaza from the School of Forestry at the University of Canterbury ... [Read more...]

(Hadley Wickham, author of ggplot2 and several other R packages, guest blogs today about forthcoming big-data improvements to his R graphics package -- ed.) Hi! I'm Hadley Wickham and I'm guest posting on the Revolutions blog to give you a taste of some of the visualisation work that my research ... [Read more...]

Rcpp package co-author Dirk Eddelbuettel provides another case study in speeding up R code by rewriting repeatedly-called R code as inline C++ functions, using the classic Fibonacci recursion algorithm as an example. The speed gains here are impressive -- over 600x compared to native recursive R code -- but you ... [Read more...]