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David Smith
January 18, 2013

Everything you ever wanted to know about R functions

It's hard to overstate the importance of functions in the R language. Pretty much everything you do in R involves calling a function. From creating objects, to doing calculations, to creating plots and fitting statistical models, everything is done by calling a function. In fact, the first R command you probably ever ran:

David Smith's picture
David Smith
January 17, 2013

In case you missed it: December 2012 Roundup

In case you missed them, here are some articles from December of particular interest to R users.

The blog is.R ran an excellent series of R tips and applications in December, with posts including working with Stata files, working with graphs and networks, and text analysis.

David Smith's picture
David Smith
January 16, 2013

Podcast: Revolution Analytics, R and the changing technology landscape

In a recent interview with DataInformed's Ian Murphy, I discussed the history of the open-source R project and how Revolution Analytics is building on R to compete with legacy statistical software such as SAS and SPSS.

David Smith's picture
David Smith
January 15, 2013

Examples combining C++ and R: The Rcpp Gallery

We've written before about how you can use the Rcpp package to speed up R, by converting performance-critical snippets of R code to C++.

David Smith's picture
David Smith
January 14, 2013

More new R user groups

It's been a little while since we've rounded up the new local R user groups around the world, so here are the latest ones on the scene:

David Smith's picture
David Smith
January 11, 2013

Databases: A Series of Tubes

451 Research analyst Matt Aslett created this Database Landscape Map:

David Smith's picture
David Smith
January 11, 2013

Mathematica adds R connectivity

Wolfram's Mathematica is the lastest software to add a connection to R, joining a long list of applications providing R access to their users. Mathematica 9 will use a Java-based link allow users to exchange data between Mathematica and R and to execute R code from within Mathematica.

David Smith's picture
David Smith
January 11, 2013

The four D's of programming's future: data, distributed, device, democratized

O'Reilly's Edd Dumbill observes that with the ubiquity of powerful computers now tied into all levels our daily lives, programming is getting dangerous: today's programmers are "like ambitious waiters stacking one teacup on top of the other". His prescription? All programmers will have to adopt programming paradigms that have previously been the domain of specialists: distributed computing, device computing, democratized computing and data computing:

David Smith's picture
David Smith
January 10, 2013

Webinar Jan 24: Using R with Hadoop

In two weeks (on January 24), Think Big Analytics' Jeffrey Breen will present a new webinar on using R with Hadoop. Here's the webinar description:

David Smith's picture
David Smith
January 9, 2013

Elements of Statistical Learning: free book download

The go-to bible for this data scientist and many others is The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction by Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani, and Jerome Friedman. Each of the authors is an expert in machine learning / prediction, and in some cases invented the techniques we turn to today to make sense of big data: ensemble learning methods, penalized regression, additive models and nonparemetric smoothing, and much much more.