[R] Revolutions blog: December 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 December:

Power BI now has a gallery of custom visualizations built with R:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/12/power-bi-custom-visuals-based-on-r.html

Chicago's Department of Public Health uses R to prioritize health inspections at restaurants:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/12/food-inspection-forecasting.html

A beautiful map of Switzerland municipalities combined with a relief map of the mountains, created with R:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/12/swiss-map.html

Using the Azure Interface Tool to parallelize the problem of optimizing an R model across the hyperparameter space:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/12/azure-r-interface-tool.html

A primer on Bayesian Statistics: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/12/bayesian-inference.html

Animating Voronoi tesselations in R to create a greeting card:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/12/merry-christmas.html

The Linux Data Science Virtual Machine, which includes several R-related components, is available for a free "test
drive" on Azure: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/12/dsvm-test-drive.html

The new AzureSMR package lets you manage Azure virtual machines, clusters and storage from R:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/12/azuresmr.html

Interactive decision trees in Microsoft R Server:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/12/interactive-decision-trees-with-microsoft-r.html

The ompr package provides numerical optimization with mixed integer programming:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/12/mixed-integer-programming-in-r-with-the-ompr-package.html

Predicting flu deaths in China with R: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/12/predicting-flu-deaths.html

Using the circlize package and Microsoft R Server's Spark interface to visualize millions of taxi trips:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/12/taxi-mrs-spark.html

The State of Indiana uses R to forecast employment:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/12/state-of-indiana-employment.html

"One Page R" is a free, multi-chapter tutorial on data science topics with R:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/12/one-page-r.html

The Deputy Chief Economist at Freddie Mac used R to animate the different rates of housing price increases around the
world: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/12/housing-prices.html

I gave a talk about the value of ecosystems to open source projects, using R as an example:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/12/the-value-of-rs-open-source-ecosystem.html

A summary of some recent projects funded by the R Consortium:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/12/r-consortium-projects-update.html 

Microsoft R Server 9.0, featuring R 3.3.2 and support for Spark 2.0, is now available:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/12/microsoft-r-server-90-now-available.html

The dplyrXdf package has been updated with new features for managing XDF data sets in Microsoft R:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/12/dplyrxdf-090-now-available.html

A stylometric analysis of the speeches of the Prime Minister of Pakistan:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/12/stylometry.html

Using R and the d3heatmap package to visualize the emotional journey of characters in "War and Peace":
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/12/war-and-peace.html#more

General interest stories (not related to R) in the past month included: the horrors of 2016
(http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/12/because-its-friday-goodbye-2016.html), a Machinima Christmas carol
(http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/12/because-its-friday-a-christmas-destiny.html), freezing bubbles
(http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/12/because-its-friday-im-forever-freezing-bubbles.html), dark comics
(http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/12/because-its-friday-angst-in-four-panels.html), and a virtual flight along
the US-Mexico border (http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/12/because-its-friday-border.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