Cascading style sheets for R plots (via the Rcssplot package)
Several impressive frameworks already exist to help with visualization (e.g. ggplot2, plot.ly, etc.) Package Rcssplot proposes to customize base-graphics plots using cascading style sheets (css) instead. Cascading style sheets are extensively used in web design because they increase productivity and ease code maintenance. The idea behind the Rcssplot package is to port these advantages to R and to display data in different styles, like in the two figures below, with minimal effort.
Apache Mahout Samsara: The Quick Start
Last week the newest Apache Mahout 0.10 was released. One of the new features it has is a new math environment called ‘Samsara’, or Mahout Scala/Spark Bindings. Samsara is a Linear Algebra library for Mahout. It’s written in Scala, which makes it possible to use operator overloading and it features nice R-like or Matlab-like syntax for basic Linear Algebra operations. For example, matrix multiplication is just X %*% Y. What is more, these operations can be distributed and run by an executing environment – currently by Apache Spark. In this article we will see how to quickly set up a basic skeleton project and then we’ll try to do some very simple analysis on a 200 MB dataset.
Rodeo: A data science IDE for Python
Rodeo is designed to be a simple, lightweight alternative to the IPython Notebook. It runs in your browser, but has the keyboard shortcuts and interactivity to make it feel more like a native app.
Six Anticipated Directions for Big Data in 2015
1. Big Data Hype Will Reach a Frenzied Peak
2. Operations Catches Up With Marketing
3. IoT Explodes, IoU Appears
4. Security, Privacy and Big Data Converge
5. Predictive Analytics Gives Way to Persuasive
6. IT Either Gets on Board, or Not
Introducing shinyjs: perform common JavaScript operations in Shiny apps using plain R code
Shiny is a fantastic R package provided by RStudio that lets you turn any R code into an interactive webpage. It’s very powerful and one of the most useful packages in my opinion. But there are just a few simple pieces of functionality that I always find missing and I implement myself in my Shiny apps using JavaScript (JS) because it’s either not supported natively by Shiny or it’s just cleaner to do so. Simple things like showing/hiding elements, enabling/disabling a button, showing a popup message to the user, manipulating the CSS class or HTML content of an element, etc. After noticing that I’m writing the same JS code in all my apps, and since making Shiny talk to JS is a bit tedious and annoying with all the message passing, I decided to just package it to make it easily reusable. Now I can simply call hide(‘panel’) or disable(‘button’). I was lucky enough to have previous experience with JS so I knew how to achieve the results that I wanted, but for any Shiny developer who is not proficient in JS, hopefully this package will make it easy to extend the power of their Shiny apps.