[R] Revolutions blog: February 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 February:

Public policy researchers use R to predict neighbourhoods in US cities
subject to gentrification:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/forecasting-gentrification.html

The ggraph package provides a grammar-of-graphics framework for
visualizing directed and undirected graphs:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/ggraph-ggplot-for-graphs.html

Facebook has open-sourced the "prophet" package they use for
forecasting time series at scale:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/facebook-prophet.html

A preview of features coming soon to R Tools for Visual Studio 1.0:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/preview-r-tools-for-visual-studio-10.html

On the differences between using Excel and R for data analysis:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/the-difference-between-r-and-excel.html

A data scientist suggests a "Gloom Index" for identifying the most
depressing songs by the band Radiohead:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/finding-radioheads-most-depressing-song-with-r.html

Catterplots is a package that replaces scatterplot points with
cats. Tufte would not approve:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/catterplots-plots-with-cats.html

A collection of tips on using Microsoft R Server from the support
team:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/six-articles-on-using-r-with-sql-server.html

A summary of the many improvements slated for R 3.4.0:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/preview-r-340.html

R code using the RevoScaleR package to classify a large database of
galaxy images in SQL Server:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/sql-server-galaxy.html

A review of four deep learning packages for R: MXNet, darch, deepnet
and h2o:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/deep-learning-in-r.html

An update on more than a dozen projects and community initiatives
funded by R Consortium grants:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/update-on-r-consortium-projects.html

R has overtaken SAS for Statistics job listings on indeed.com:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/job-trends-for-r-and-python.html

ModernDive is a free online textbook on Statistics and data science:
using R: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/moderndive.html

A solution (with R code) for modeling customer churn in the retail
industry using SQL Server R Services:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/retail-applications-with-microsoft-r.html

The superheat package provides enhanced heatmap graphics for R:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/superheat-supercharged-heatmaps-for-r.html

The fst package provides a new serialization format for R data focused
on performance:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/fst-fast-serialization-of-r-data-frames.html

Thomas Dinsmore reflects on major events in the R Project and for
Microsoft in 2016:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/the-year-in-r.html

And some general interest stories (not necassarily related to R):
* A big drain
  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/because-its-friday-looking-down-the-glory-hole.html
* 'Vous' vs 'tu'
  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/because-its-friday-et-tu.html
* A remembrance of the late Hans Rosling
  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/because-its-friday-remembering-hans-rosling.html
* Ten Meter Tower, a short film
  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/because-its-friday-jump.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