[R] Revolutions blog: May 2017 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.

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

Many interesting presentations recorded at the R/Finance 2017
conference in Chicago are now available to watch:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/05/watch-rfinance-2017.html

A review of some of the R packages and projects implemented at the
2017 ROpenSci Unconference:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/05/runconf17.html

An example of applying Bayesian Learning with the "bnlearn" package to
challenge stereotypical assumptions:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/05/who-is-the-caretaker.html

Data from the Billboard Hot 100 chart used to find the most popular
words in the titles of pop hits:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/05/love-is-all-around.html

Microsoft R Open 3.4.0 is now available for Windows, Mac and Linux:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/05/microsoft-r-open-340-now-available.html

How to use the "tweenr" package to create smooth transitions in data
animations: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/05/tweenr.html

A preview of some of the companies and R applications to be presented
at the EARL conference in San Francisco:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/05/preview-of-earl-san-francisco.html

The AsureDSVM package makes it easy to spawn and manage clusters of
the Azure Data Science Virtual Machine:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/05/azuredsvm-a-new-r-package-for-elastic-use-of-the-azure-data-science-virtual-machine.html

A course on spatial data analysis in R, from the Consumer Data
Research Centre in the UK:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/05/cdrc-spatial-course.html

Video and slides of Lixun Zhang's presentation "R in Financial
Services: Challenges and Opportunity" from the New York R Conference:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/05/r-in-financial-services-presentation.html

Visual Studio 2017 now features built-in support for both R and Python
development:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/05/r-and-python-support-now-built-in-to-visual-studio-2017.html

Quantifying the home-field advantage in English Premier League
football:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/05/analyzing-the-home-advantage-in-english-soccer-with-r.html

Using the new CRAN_package_db function to analyze data about CRAN
packages:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/05/analyzing-data-on-cran-packages.html

Stack Overflow Trends tracks the trajectory of questions about R and Python:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/05/stack-overflow-trends.html

A recorded webinar on using Microsoft R to predict length of stay in
hospitals:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/05/hospital-length-of-stay.html

The new "Real-Time Scoring" capability in Microsoft R Server creates a
service to generate predictions from certain models in milliseconds:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/05/real-time-scoring-with-mrs-91.html

"Technical Foundations of Informatics" is an open course guide on data
analysis and visualization with R with a modern slant:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/05/technical-foundations-of-informatics.html

The Datasaurus Dozen generalizes Anscombe's Quartet with a process to
greate datasets of any shape with (nearly) the same summary
statistics:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/05/the-datasaurus-dozen.html

You can now use Microsoft R within Alteryx Designer:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/05/using-microsoft-r-with-alteryx.html

And some general interest stories (not necessarily related to R):

* The history of Australia's states: 
  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/05/because-its-friday-history-of-australia.html

* An amusingly animated history of the Universe:
  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/05/the-history-of-the-universe-in-20-minutes.html

* How to clean messy data in Excel by providing just a few examples of
  transformations:
  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/05/clean-messy-data-by-providing-examples-in-excel.html

* A Neural Network predicts a movie from just one frame:
  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/05/because-its-friday-video-projection.html

* The Bayesian Trap, explained:
  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/05/becasue-its-friday-bayesian-trap.html

* CareerCast ranks Statistician as the best job to have in 2017:
  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/05/best-job-i2017-statistican.html

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