Gartner 2015 Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics Platforms: who gained and who lost
SAS, IBM, KNIME, and RapidMiner lead in Gartner 2015 Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics Platforms. We analyze who gained and who lost versus last year.

Base R Plots
There’s a lot of talk about ggplot these days (we even wrote a Python version of it) and for good reason: it’s a great plotting package that’s easy to use. Despite this, I sometimes find myself wanting something even quicker than ggplot. When that’s the case, I turn to base R plots. They’re not as pretty and the syntax is a little unpleasant but they’re very fast, work on just about anything, and are often used by the pros. In those regards, it’s actually really similar to UNIX tools such as grep, sed, and awk. So sit back, relax, and get ready to have some fun with R base plots!

Minimal examples help
The other day I got stuck working with a huge data set using data.table in R. It took me a little while to realise that I had to produce a minimal reproducible example to actually understand why I got stuck in the first place. I know, this is the mantra I should follow before I reach out to R-help, Stack Overflow or indeed the package authors. Of course, more often than not, by following this advise, the problem becomes clear and with that the solution obvious. Ok, here is the problem. Well, easy to write down now, after I understood it.

Make prettier documents by reusing chunks in RMarkdown
No revelations here, just a little R tip for generating more readable documents.
Screenshot-RStudio.png
Original with lots of code at the top
There are times when I want to show code in a document, but I don’t want it to be the first thing that people see. What I want to see first is the output from that code. In this silly example, I want the reader to focus their attention on the result of myFunction(), which is 49.

RStudio v0.99 Preview: Code Completion
We’re busy at work on the next version of RStudio (v0.99) and this week will be blogging about some of the noteworthy new features. If you want to try out any of the new features now you can do so by downloading the RStudio Preview Release.
The first feature to highlight is a fully revamped implementation of code completion for R. We’ve always supported a limited form of completion however (a) it only worked on objects in the global environment; and (b) it only worked when expressly requested via the tab key. As a result not nearly enough users discovered or benefitted from code completion. In this release code completion is much more comprehensive.

RStudio v0.99 Preview: Vim Mode Improvements
RStudio’s code editor includes a set of lightweight Vim key bindings. You can turn these on in Tools | Global Options | Code | Editing …