[R] Revolutions blog: March 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 March:

A tutorial and comparison of the SparkR, sparklyr, rsparkling, and
RevoScaleR packages for using R with Spark:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/tutorial-scaling-r.html

An analysis of Scrabble games between AI players:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/scrabblr.html

The doAzureParallel package, a backend to "foreach" for parallel
computations on Azure-based clusters:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/doazureparallel.html

The UK government project to automate reporting of official statistics
with R: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/uk-statistics.html

Data science languages R and Python rank highly in the latest Redmond
popularity rankings:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/redmonk-jan-2017.html

FiveThirtyEight used R to find clusters of similar subreddits:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/comparing-subreddits.html

RTVS 1.0, which provides R support to Visual Studio, is now available:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/announcing-r-tools-10-for-visual-studio-2015.html

The mrsdeploy package (part of Microsoft R Server) facilitates
publishing an R function as a web service on Azure:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/running-your-r-code-azure.html

The Call for Papers for the EARL conferences in London and San
Francisco closes on April 14:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/give-a-talk-about-an-application-of-r-at-earl.html

Alteryx Designer has been integrated with Microsoft R:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/alteryx-integrates-with-microsoft-r.html

StitchFix, the personal styling service, uses R and Python as part of
their data science process:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/data-science-at-stitchfix.html

A review of "Testing R Code", by Richie Cotton:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/review-testing-r-code.html

On the connection between AUC and the Mann-Whitney U-Statistic:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/auc-meets-u-stat.html

An overview of neural networks and R packages to train them:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/neural-networks-r.html

Performance benchmarks of rxNeuralNetwork (in the MicrosoftML
package):
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/benchmarking-rxneuralnet.html

Updates to the Data Science Virtual Machine for Linux:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/dsvm-linux-updates.html

A timelapse of the founding of cities since 3500BC:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/the-rise-of-civilization-visualized-with-r.html

A set of R scripts and sample data to predict employee attrition:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/employee-retention.html

R 3.3.3 is now available:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/r-333-now-available.html

The htmlwidgets gallery provides indexes interactive web-based charts
for R:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/htmlwidgets-gallery.html

R-based analyses to predict the length of a hospital stay:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/hospital-length-of-stay.html

Scholarships to encourage diversity at useR!2017:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/diversity-scholarships.html

And some general interest stories (not necessarily related to R): 
* Simulating the galaxy
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/because-its-friday-universe-time-lapse.html
* A poor showing at Crufts
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/because-its-friday-run-ollie-run.html
* Why some memes survive better than others
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/because-its-friday-memes.html
* A digital clock made in Life:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/because-its-friday-timelife.html
* A tongue-in-cheek guide to reading sheet music:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/because-its-friday-how-to-read-music.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