R Programming Language

R user Bob Rudis has written an R script to grab up-to-date hurricane tracking data from Unisys Weather, and combine it with the forecast cone from Google's crisis map, to create the following combined picture of where Sandy's been, and where it's going.[read more]

Announcement and description of an upcoming webinar on the topic of Big Data, Data Science and R. Titled "The Rise of Data Science in the Age of Big Data Analytics: Why Data Distillation and Machine Learning Aren’t Enough", - a provocative look at why data scientists cannot be replaced by technology, and why R is the ideal environment for building data science applications.[read more]

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Data Scientist Drew Conway tackles the problem of deciding which programming languages are the most popular in an interesting way: by comparing the number of projects tagged in GitHub with each language, and the number of questions in StackOverflow about the language.[read more]

Jeffrey Breen (the man behind the Twitter airline sentiment analysis example) recently posted a collection of slides with some great tips for accessing data from R. Here are slides from his presentation.[read more]

“The empires of the future are the empires of the mind,” said Sir Winston Churchill at Harvard University in 1943. He frequently spoke of humanity’s minds in descriptions of the future and this is such an important point. It is our brains that give us both the vision for what we want the future to be and the capacity to make that future....[read more]

If you don't have the R sources handy, and just want to check on the contents of a file or two, a read-only, browsable mirror of the R-devel sources is now available at GitHub. This mirror is updated hourly from the SubVersion repository that the R core team uses to manage the R source code.[read more]

The animation was created in R using the rgl package, which uses OpenGL for the 3-D rendering. Note the depiction of undersea mountains (based on GEBCO bathymetry data) which can hold sea ice in place, and the monthly ice extents (drawn from satellite-derived sea ice concentrations from NSIDC).[read more]

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"I had a great time yesterday moderating the "R in Action" panel discussion at the DataWeek conference in San Francisco. Each of the panelists represented a company that is actively using R and/or Revolution R Enterprise. Here (from memory, since I couldn't take notes) are some the things they shared."[read more]

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The size of data sets is increasing much more rapidly than the speed of cores, of RAM, and of disk drives. This is particularly true of electronic health records (EHRs) and other health care data, where multi-billion-row relational tables with dozens to thousands of columns are common in data warehouses derived from EHRs.[read more]

Ricky Ho has created a reference a 6-page PDF reference card on Big Data Machine Learning, with examples implemented in the R language.[read more]

Even though forums and question-and-answer services like StackOverflow are emerging as the place to find crowdsourced technical help when using software like R, the traditional r-help email list is still going strong. UCLA grad student and R user Richard Kwock presented a poster at last month's JSM conference with an analysis of traffic on the list[read more]

The R language retains its #1 ranking as the most commonly-used software for data mining. R is now used by 52.5% of poll respondents, compared with 45% last year. Donnie Berkholz notes, "The general trend of newer, open-source languages are growing at varying speeds (Python followed by R and Hadoop-based options like Hive/Pig), while older languages including Java, SAS, and Matlab are bleeding users."[read more]

The Environmental Performance Index (EPI) ranks countries on performance indicators for environmental public health and ecosystem vitality. Yale University hosts the EPI website, which was used to present the 2012 EPI Rankings to world leaders at the 2012 World Economic Forum at Davos. The Country Profiles section of the website allowed...[read more]

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R user Markus Gesmann used the gold-winning times from the Olympic Men's 100m sprint since 1990 as the basis of the this prediction for the London Games.[read more]

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Googler Karl Millar estimated that there are at least 200 active R users at Google, plus another 300+ occasional users participating in Google's internal R support list. But what are all these Google employees doing with R?[read more]