Jesse Bridgewater works on "social search awesomeness" for the Bing search engine, and is setting up his dev environment with the necessary tools including python, vim, and R. Jesse has shared a handy script he uses to install all the specialty packages he uses for his data analysis. This is ... [Read more...]

An the New York R User Group* last night, 100 R users heard Ni Wang and Max Lin talk explain how "R is one of the important tools used by analysts and engineers at Google for analyzing data". During the talk, Lin revealed that Google plans to make "R more integrated ... [Read more...]

InfoChimps.com is mainly known as a clearinghouse for finding large data sets, for free or for sale. But they have also released (in beta, at least) an API that lets you find some pretty useful information on-demand. Normally, you'd have you use RESTful calls to access the API, but ... [Read more...]

Part of the reason R has become so popular is the vast array of packages available at the cran and bioconductor repositories. In the last few years, the number of packages has grown exponentially! This is a short post giving steps on how to actually install R packages. Let’s ... [Read more...]

Update: the competition was just launched. * * * What is the competition about? Drew Conway and John Myles Whyte have collected data from (52) R users about the packages they have installed. The data is now available on github for download and the contest will be run on the kaggle platform. For more ... [Read more...]

What makes an R package popular? The number of people that use a given R package is a common point of discussion, but it turns out that it's kind of tricky to get hard and fast data to answer this question. You can look at the "I use this" number ... [Read more...]

A few hours ago, Jens Oehlschlägel has announced on the R-help mailing list of the release of a new version of the ff package. The ff package provides data structures that are stored on disk but behave (almost) as if they were in RAM by transparently mapping only a ... [Read more...]

For the third year running, the Google Summer of Code program has sponsored a number of students working with R, and has again resulted in several new contributions expanding R in various fields. Dirk Eddelbuettel, who coordinated the R-related projects for GSoC in 2010, summarized the results, with details about the ... [Read more...]

Hadley Wickham has just released updates to his data-manipulation packages for R, plyr and reshape (now called reshape2), that are much faster and more memory-efficient than the previous incarnations. The reshape2 package lets you flexibly restructure and aggregate data using just three functions (melt, acast and dcast), whereas the plyr ... [Read more...]

At the ASA Statistical Computing Award ceremony in Vancouver last month, R's co-creator Ross Ihaka said that R began as a "system that was functional and well-designed, and made it easy and fun for other people to help". R's other co-creator, Robert Gentleman, also described the ability of others to ... [Read more...]

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Hadley Wickham has announced that new versions of his popular grammar-of-graphics charting package ggplot2 and his general-purpose data reshaping tool plyr for R are now available. plyr boasts several new features, most notably a new join function which should simplify what can sometimes be a difficult process in R: merging ... [Read more...]

The latest edition of the R Journal is now available. This issue includes in-depth articles on the packages IsoGene, glmmBUGS, cshapes, tmvtnorm, neuralnet, glmperm and exactci/exact2x2, plus an example of reproducible research in R. There's also a review of the book A Beginner's Guide to R. The complete ... [Read more...]

My colleague Saar Golde was having some troubles connecting Revolution R to MySQL on Windows (64-bit). Turned out the problem was the lack of an environment variable. He documented the instructions for fixing the problem on Windows 7, below. Thanks, Saar! The Problem: A client is about to send me a ... [Read more...]

This is a list of new or updated packages that were released for R in February, as announced on the r-packages mailing list. To include other updates on this list, please email David Smith. For a complete list of all updates on CRAN, see the CRANberries archive for February 2010. Follow ... [Read more...]

A special double edition of the Package Update Roundup this month! This is a list of new or updated packages that were released for R in December and January, as announced on the r-packages mailing list. To include other updates on this list, please email David Smith. For a complete ... [Read more...]

Hadley Wickham recently updated the ggplot2 package for R to version 0.8.5. In addition to bugfixes and performance improvements, this version introduces some handy new features. Among them: the ability to display mathematical equations as text, automatic legends for color scales, and user-configurable axis labels and legend titles. The Learning R ... [Read more...]