Another text analysis package

Quanteda seems to be a serious contender for analyzing textual data using R.

Rstudio 0.99.878 becomes official

Rstudio 0.99.878 becomes official. There is server version in AUR that can be used. However, the pandoc that comes with that version seems to have problems on Arch/Manjora. The discussion here is very helpful. One easy solution is to replace the built-in pandoc with the one that comes with the system:

sudo mv /usr/lib/rstudio-server/bin/pandoc/pandoc /usr/lib/rstudio-server/bin/pandoc/pandoc_old
sudo mv /usr/lib/rstudio-server/bin/pandoc/pandoc-citeproc /usr/lib/rstudio-server/bin/pandoc/pandoc-citeproc_old

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/pandoc /usr/lib/rstudio-server/bin/pandoc/pandoc
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/pandoc-citeproc /usr/lib/rstudio-server/bin/pandoc/pandoc-citeproc

Alternate R Markdown Templates

These alternative R Markdown templates look great.

ggplot2 extensions

Here is a list of ggplot2 extension packages.

Notebook interface for everything

Zeppelin provides a unified interface for nearly all the major data process engines, including Spark. I quickly set it up on a virtual machine and gave it a test run. It works great.

This one has SparkR support built-in.

I was never really into the ipython/jupyter notebook mainly because there is nothing they can do that a good IDE such as PyCharm or Rodeo cannot. Zeppelin is different because its capability of tightly integrating different Spark front-ends, including Scala, Python, and R is uniquely powerful. I would call this revolutionary.

R Users Will Now Inevitably Become Bayesians

Good post here. I would also add that the rethinking package is a third option that helps R users to become a Bayesian.

Rodeo 1.0: a Python IDE on your Desktop

This looks cool.

Getting Started with Spark (in Python)

Using Python, here.

Launch Apache Spark on AWS EC2 and Initialize SparkR Using RStudio

Helpful information here.