[R] Revolutions blog: May 2016 roundup

[David Smith]

Since 2008, Microsoft (formerly Revolution Analytics) 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.

And in case you missed them, here are some articles related to R from the month of May:

A 3-part tutorial on principal components regression in R: part 1
(http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/05/principal-components-tutorial.html); part 2
(http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/05/principal-components-regression-part-2.html); part 3
(http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/05/principal-components-regression-in-r-part-3.html).

Implications of the fact that in R, names have objects (and not vice-versa):
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/05/an-object-has-no-name.html

Highlights of the R/Finance 2016 conference: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/05/r-finance-2016.html

A template for predicting maintenance events for aircraft engines, using R:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/05/predictive-maintenance-r-code.html

The "feather" package for fast data exchange between Python and R, now on CRAN:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/05/feather-package.html

Microsoft R Open 3.2.5 now available:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/05/microsoft-r-open-325-now-available.html

There are now R user groups in 223 cities and 55 countries:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/05/user-groups-and-r-awareness.html

A preview of Spark 2.0 and the updated SparkR package:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/05/spark-20-to-include-more-r-models.html

All the documentation for Microsoft R Server is now available to everyone, online:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/05/microsoft-r-server-documentation.html

The most popular (and controversial) ingredients in pasta carbonara, visualized with R:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/05/whats-in-pasta-carbonara.html

Joseph Rickert's guidelines for identifying the best R packages:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/05/good-r-packages.html

"Effective Graphs with Microsoft R Open", a free e-book, is available for download:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/05/e-book-effective-graphs.html

Estimating demand for bike rentals in Washington, DC with R:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/05/bike-rental-demand.html

R Tools for Visual Studio 0.3 now available:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/05/r-tools-for-visual-studio-30-now-available.html

A brief summary of the changes and new features in R 3.3.0:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/05/r-330-now-available.html

A tutorial on installing R packages on a firewalled SQL Server instance:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/05/minicran-sql-server.html

How to train gradient-boosted trees with Microsoft R Server:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/05/build-a-gradient-boosted-trees-model-with-mrs.html

Reproducing results in Efron's 1987 paper "Logistic Regression, Survival Analysis, and the Kaplan-Meier Curve"
using R: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/04/reading-efron-with-r-1.html

General interest stories (not related to R) in the past month included: the history of Japan
(http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/05/history-of-japan.html), a magnet machine
(http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/05/magnet-machine.html), an audio-visual history of the Billboard Top 5
(http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/05/because-its-friday-the-time-travelling-jukebox.html), and roads to Romes
(http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/05/because-its-friday-the-roads-to-rome.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.

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, Microsoft  
Tel: +1 (312) 9205766 (Chicago IL, USA)
Twitter: @revodavid | Blog:  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com