Decision Mechanics

Insight. Applied.

R Notebooks

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RStudio have announced R Notebooks. This adds an interactive execution model to R Markdown documents.

In R Markdown documents text and code can be mixed to create active documents that perform and update analyses as they are run.

However, R Markdown documents are executed in batch mode. This makes them more suitable for reporting than for teaching and investigation.

With the introduction of R Notebooks, code segments in the R Markdown document can be edited and executed in isolation—making the whole experience much more interactive.

R Notebooks can be saved as text (HTML) files allowing them to be shared via GitHub, for example. The HTML files can be viewed in a standard web browser as static documents. However, when the files are opened in RStudio, the R Notebook is automatically recreated from the HTML.

Support is also provided for languages other than R, including Python, C and SQL.

For more information, check out the development team’s YouTube video.

ScaleR package now available as part of free Microsoft R Client

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The ScaleR package provides functions for performing scalable and extremely high performance data management, analysis, and visualization in R. It was only available to those who had a Microsoft R Server license—until now.

With the introduction of the free Microsoft R Client for Windows tool you can now work with the full set of ScaleR functions without having to part with a cent.

Of course, there’s a catch—there are constraints. Specifically

[…] the data to be processed must fit in local memory, and processing is limited up to two threads for ScaleR functions.

However, this allows you to prototype your analyses using the free client and push them to SQL Server or Hadoop using Microsoft R Server when you need to scale.

Tufte in R

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minimal line plot using ggplot2

Lukasz Piwek maintains a resource that shows how the visualization practices developed by Edward Tufte can be replicated in R.

His neat Tufte in R site currently contains examples of the following visualizations

  • minimal line plot
  • range-frame (or quartile-frame) scatterplot
  • dot-dash (or rug) scatterplot
  • minimal boxplot
  • minimal barchart
  • slopegraph
  • sparklines
  • stem-and-leaf display

It’s a living resource, so he’s adding to the collection over time.

Example code is given for R base graphics, lattice and ggplot2.