[R] Revolutions blog: October 2017 roundup

[David Smith (CLOUD AI)]

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 October:

A recent survey of competitors on the Kaggle platform reveals that Python (76%)
and R (59%) are the preferred tools for building predictive models:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/10/survey-of-kagglers.html

Microsoft's "Team Data Science Process" has been updated with new guidelines on
use of the IDEAR framework for R and Python:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/10/recent-updates-to-the-team-data-science-process.html

Microsoft R Open 3.4.2 is now available for Windows, Mac and Linux:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/10/microsoft-r-open-342-now-available.html

Using the foreach package to estimate bias of rpart trees via bootstrapping:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/10/bias-bootstrap-foreach.html

Replays of webinars on the Azure Data Science VM, and on document collection
analysis with Azure ML Workbench, are now available:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/10/two-upcoming-webinars.html

The "officer" package makes it possible to create PowerPoint and Word documents
from R http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/10/office-charts.html, and even
include editable R charts
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/10/office-charts.html

An online book on statistical machine learning with the MicrosoftML package:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/10/statistical-machine-learning-with-microsoft-ml.html

An updated list of major events in the history of the R project, 1992-2016:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/10/updated-history-of-r.html

An overview of the R manuals, now also available in Bookdown format:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/10/r-manuals-bookdown.html

An analysis comparing the speeds of bikes and taxis for trips across New York
City: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/10/bokes-taxis-nyc.html

Vision-based AI techniques used to estimate the population of snow leopards:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/10/snow-leopards.html

ROpenSci interviews me (David Smith) about working in the R community:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/10/my-interview-with-ropensci.html

A generational neural network, implemented in R, synthesizes startup names and
business plans:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/10/an-ai-pitches-startup-ideas.html

Two R-themed crosswords: a cryptic one by Barry Rowlingson
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/10/a-cryptic-crossword-with-an-r-twist.html,
and a standard one from R-Ladies DC
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/10/r-crossword.html

A tutorial on using Azure Data Lake Analytics with R:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/10/adla-with-r.html

The remarkable growth of R, as seen in StackOverflow traffic data:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/10/rs-remarkable-growth.html

Version 1.0.0 of the dplyrXdf package, providing dplyr operations for Microsoft
R out-of-memory data files, is now available:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/10/announcing-dplyrxdf-10.html

The GPU-enabled Deep Learning Virtual Machine on Azure includes R, Spark,
Tensorflow and more:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/10/deep-learning-vm.html

A comparison of assault death rates in the US and other advanced democracies,
generated in R by Kieran Healy:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/10/assault-death-rates.html

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

* Analysis of the film Ex Machina, and others
  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/10/because-its-friday-movies-with-mikey.html

* Time-lapse video of a 30-day voyage on a cargo ship:
  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/10/because-its-friday-30-days-of-cargo.html

* Films made with Line Rider:
  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/10/because-its-friday-line-rider.html

* A website suggests a random cause of death, from CDC data:
  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/10/because-its-friday-death-risk.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 AI & Research  
Tel: +1 (312) 9205766 (Chicago IL, USA)
Twitter: @revodavid | Blog:  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com