[R] Revolutions blog: October 2015 roundup

[David Smith]

Since 2008, Revolution Analytics (and now Microsoft) staff and guests have written about R every weekday at the
Revolutions blog:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com
and every month I post a summary of articles from the previous month of particular interest to readers of r-help.

In case you missed them, here are some articles related to R from the month of October:

A way of dealing with confounding variables in experiments: instrumental variable analysis with the ivmodel package for
R: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/10/instrumental-variables.html

The new dplyrXdf package http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/10/the-dplyrxdf-package.html allows you to manipulate
large, out-of-memory data sets in the XDF format (used by the RevoScaleR package) using dplyr syntax:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/10/using-the-dplyrxdf-package.html

Some guidelines for using explicit parallel programming (e.g. the parallel package) with the implicit multithreading
provided by Revolution R Open:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/10/edge-cases-in-using-the-intel-mkl-and-parallel-programming.html

Ross Ihaka was featured in a full-page advertisement for the University of Auckland in The Economist:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/10/ross-ihaka-in-the-economist.html

A video from the PASS 2015 conference in Seattle shows R running within SQL Server 2016:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/215/10/demo-r-in-sql-server-2016.html . The preview for SQL Server 2016 includes
Revolution R Enterprise (as SQL Server R Services)
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/10/revolution-r-now-available-with-sql-server-community-preview.html

A comparison of fitting decision trees in R with the party and rpart packages:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/10/party-with-the-first-tribe.html

The foreach suite of packages for parallel programming in R has been updated, and now includes support for progress bars
when using doSNOW: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/10/updates-to-the-foreach-package-and-its-friends.html

The "reach" package allows you to call Matlab functions directly from R:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/10/reach-for-your-matlab-data-with-r.html

A review of support vector machines (SVMs) in R:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/10/the-5th-tribe-support-vector-machines-and-caret.html

A presentation (with sample code) shows how to call Revolution R Enterprise from SQL Server 2016:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/10/previewing-using-revolution-r-enterprise-inside-sql-server.html

A tutorial on using the miniCRAN package to set up packages for use with R in Azure ML:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/10/using-minicran-in-azure-ml.html

Asif Salam shows how to use the RDCOMClient package to construct interactive Powerpoint slide shows with R:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/10/programmatically-create-interactive-powerpoint-slides-with-r.html

A directory of online R courses for all skill levels:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/10/learning-r-oct-2015.html

Using R's nls() optimizer to solve a problem in Bayesian inference:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/10/parameters-and-percentiles-the-gamma-distribution.html

A professor uses the miniCRAN package to deliver R packages to offline facilities in Turkey and Iran:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/10/using-minicran-on-site-in-iran.html

Amanda Cox, graphics editor at the New York Times, calls R "the greatest software on Earth" in a podcast:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/10/amanda-cox-on-using-r-at-the-nyt.html

Hadley Wickham answered many questions in a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" session:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/10/hadley-wickhams-ask-me-anything-on-reddit.html

A roundup of several talks given at R user group meetings around the world:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/10/r-user-groups-highlight-r-creativity.html

General interest stories (not related to R) in the past month included: visualizing the movements of chess pieces
(http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/10/chess-piece-moves.html), real-time face replication
(http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/10/because-its-friday-faceon.html), a world map of antineutrinos
(http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/10/because-its-friday-mapping-antineutrinos.html), a transformation
(http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/10/because-its-friday-a-transformation.html), and a warning about "big data"
applications (http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/10/because-its-friday-are-we-selling-radium-underpants.html).

Meeting times for local R user groups (http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/local-r-groups.html) can be found on the
updated R Community Calendar at: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/calendar.html

If you're looking for more articles about R, you can find summaries from previous months at
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/roundups/. You can receive daily blog posts via email using services like
blogtrottr.com, or join the Revolution Analytics mailing list at http://revolutionanalytics.com/newsletter to be alerted
to new articles on a monthly basis.

As always, thanks for the comments and please keep sending suggestions to me at davidsmi at microsoft.com or via Twitter
(I'm @revodavid).

Cheers,
# David

-- 
David M Smith <davidsmi at microsoft.com>
R Community Lead, Revolution Analytics (a Microsoft company)  
Tel: +1 (312) 9205766 (Chicago IL, USA)
Twitter: @revodavid | Blog:  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com