Earlier this month I attended the inaugural SatRday Newcastle. This was my first time attending a SatRday event, and I had a really enjoyable day. The event was sponsored by Newcastle University, Sage, RStudio and Jumping Rivers. There were over 100 attendees from across the U.K. Most attendees were from industry, although there were also

One of the great things about R, is the myriad of packages. Packages are typically installed via CRAN Bioconductor GitHub But how often do we think about what we are installing? Do we pay attention or just install when something looks neat? Do we think about security or just take it that everything is secure?

When discussing how to speed up slow R code, my first question is what is your computer spec? It’s always surprised me that people are wondering why analysing big data is slow, yet they are using a five-year-old cheap laptop. Spending a few thousand pounds would often make their problems disappear. To quantify the impact

Jumping Rivers is a data science company based in Newcastle. We are not sector based and our clients range through all industries. We are looking for individuals who enjoy a challenge. Main Duties Technical Duties: Provide technical training Development of bespoke statistical algorithms. Building web applications using R and Shiny. Data analysis using R and/or

We are pleased to announce the very first Satrday event in Newcastle upon Tyne (and England). satRdays Newcastle is a one-day, low-cost, community organised R conference in the heart of Newcastle City Centre. Where? The event will be held at Newcastle University. Getting to Newcastle is really easy Train: 90 minutes from Edinburgh or 3

R conference Costs Last year we gave you a price break down of some of the most popular R conferences around the globe for 2017. We’re going to do it again for 2018. Remember, you can get up-to-date information on upcoming conferences via our GitHub page. It’s important to note that these costs are the

Introduction Domain squatting or URL hijacking is a straightforward attack that requires little skill. An attacker registers a domain that is similar to the target domain and hopes that a user accidentally visits the site. For example, if the domain is example.com, then a typo-squatter would register similar domains such as common misspelling: examples.com misspellings

At Jumping Rivers we run a lot of R courses. Some of our most popular courses revolve around the tidyverse, in particular, our Introduction to the tidyverse and our more advanced mastering course. We even trained over 200 data scientists NHS – see our case study for more details. As you can imagine, when giving

I love R and I love Shiny. One of the things I really like about shiny is the ease with which you can incorporate other Javascript based tools and libraries. By my own admission, my JavaScript skills are definitely lacking but there are so many cool libraries out there which can really make visualisation and

Last week I spent some time reminiscing about my PhD and looking through some old R code. This trip down memory lane led to some of my old R scripts that amazingly still run. My R scripts were fairly simple and just created a few graphs. However now that I’ve been programming in R for

Ever wonder what an evolving gif of each premier league team’s goal difference vs points would look like made in R? Look no further! Most of this is going to be setting up the data (as always) instead of actually plotting the data. To get the data into shape, we’re going to be using the

Anyone who has a long commute or who has to travel with work knows the importance of podcasts. Podcasts allow you turn otherwise useless time, into something both productive and interesting. In this blog post, we’ll describe some of our favourite podcasts. This list isn’t meant to be exhaustive, it’s just what we are currently

Styling ggplot2 graphics In our previous post, we demonstrated that contrary to popular opinion, it is possible to generate attractive looking plots using just base graphics. Although we did confess, that it did take a lot of time and effort. In this post, we repeat the same exercise. Using the dreaded iris data set, we’ll

So it’s here… After lots of entries (147 to be precise), we can finally announce the winner of the WhyR 2018 Competition! But first, we have to tell you quickly about how we picked the winner. How we did it So it really wasn’t that hard. We held the questionnaire on typeform. Conveniently, my colleague has

The competition It’s competition time! We’re sponsoring Why R? 2018 Conference. The conference runs from the 2-5th of July in Wroclaw, Poland and us nice folks here at Jumping Rivers are giving away a free ticket to the conference! The competition To enter your name into the prize draw all you have to do is

Big news, from the 13th till the 27th June Jumping Rivers will be running 6 courses on R in Hamburg!!. It should be noted that each course runs for one day, apart from the Predictive Analytics course, which runs for 2 days. The courses are as follows: Introduction to R – 13th For this course,

Well well well, we’ve only gone and won The Water Hub hackathon! Well, joint winners but the main word is WINNER. First of all we want to say thank you to all the guys at the Water Hub and the Sunderland Software Centre for organising and inviting. There was some tough competition there and we

The Main Competition The Secondary Competition What next? The results of the eRum competition are in! Before we announce the winners we would like to thank everyone who entered. It has been a pleasure to look at all of the ideas on show. The Main Competition The winner of the main competition is Lukasz Janiszewski.

Regex: The backslash, \ Regex: The hat ,^, and dollar, $ Regex: Round parentheses,(), and the pipe, | Regex: Square parentheses,[], and the asterisk, * Regular expressions. How they can be cruel! Well we’re here to make them a tad easier. To do so we’re going to make use of the stringr package install.packages("stringr") library("stringr")

At Jumping Rivers we often collaborate with the local community. This includes attending regional events such as those run by Creative FUSE, a partnership between the North East’s five universities. I recently attended an event at the National Glass Centre called ReCoding the Wall. The artwork, Colour Field, is a large interactive LED wall currently

Set-up Getting the tweets Are world leaders actually bots? Set-up Given that I do quite like twitter, I thought it would be a good idea to right about R’s interface to the twitter API; rtweet. As usual, we can grab the package in the usual way. We’re also going to need the tidyverse for the

During a very quick tour of Edinburgh (and in particular some distilleries), Dave Robinson (Tidytext fame), was able to drop by the Edinburgh R meet-up group to give a very neat talk on tidy text. The first part of the talk set the scene What does does text mean? Why make text tidy? What sort

Leeds (Predictive Analytics in R) London (Tensorflow) Birmingham (Python & Machine Learning) Hi there! We’re running some courses on R, Python and Tensorflow around the UK that you might be interested in! All courses are spearheaded with lectures by one of our first-class trainers. The lectures are interspersed with practicals and coffee breaks. Attendees get

The Main Competition The Secondary Competition So… big news. Jumping Rivers is sponsoring eRum 2018 and in light of this news we are giving away a free place at the conference! (Not to mention our very own lead consultant, Colin Gillespie, is one of the invited speakers.) The Main Competition Here at Jumping Rivers, we

Hi all, so given our logo here at Jumping Rivers is a set of lines designed to look like a Gaussian Process, we thought it would be a neat idea to recreate this image in R. To do so we’re going to need a couple packages. We do the usual install.packages() dance (remember this step

Publication quality base R graphics Fixing the problem Why not use ggplot2 (or something else)? Publication quality base R graphics Base R graphics get a bad press (although to be fair, they could have chosen their default values better). In general, they are viewed as a throw back to the dawn of the R era.

This year we had the privilege of sponsoring StanCon. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to actually attend the conference. Rather than let our ticket go to waste, we ran a small competition, which Ignacio Martinez won with his very cool (but in alpha stage) R package – see gif above. Highlights from StanCon 2018 During my

What is SatRday? SatRday in Cape Town Be in it to win it Jumping Rivers is proud to be sponsoring the upcoming SatRday conference in Cape Town, South Africa on 17th March 2018. What is SatRday? SatRdays are a collection of free/cheap accessible R conferences organised by members of the R community at various locations

What are tibbles? Precursors Tribblemaking Tibbles vs Data Frames Disadvantages To summarise.. Let’s get something straight, there isn’t really any trouble with tibbles. I’m hoping you’ve noticed this is a play on 1967 Star Trek episode, “The Trouble with Tribbles”. I’ve recently got myself a job as a Data Scientist, here, at Jumping Rivers. Having

In last weeks post we tantalised you with upcoming R & data science conferences, but from a cost point of view, not all R conferences are the same. Using the R conference site, it’s fairly easy to compare the cost of previous R conferences. I selected the main conferences over the last few years and

It’s that time of year when we need to start thinking about what R Conferences we would like to (and can!) attend. To help plan your (ahem) work trips, we thought it would be useful to list the upcoming main attractions. We maintain a list of upcoming rstats conferences. To keep up to date, just

Can’t be bothered reading, tell me now Getting started Setting up R Opening ports ready for RStudio Installing RStudio Nicer URLs Adding SSL Can’t be bothered reading, tell me now Host RStudio server on an azure instance. Configure the instance to access RStudio with a nice url Getting started Azure is cloud computing framework provided

The prize How do I enter? FAQ Today we are happy to announce our Stan contest. Something we feel very strongly at Jumping Rivers is giving back to the community. We have benefited immensely from hard work by numerous people, so when possible, we try to give something back. This year we’re sponsoring StanCon 2018.

Prerequisites Analysis Summary The plotly package. A godsend for interactive documents, dashboard and presentations. For such documents, there is no doubt that anyone would prefer a plot created in plotly rather than ggplot2. Why? Using plotly gives you neat and crucially interactive options at the top, whereas ggplot2 objects are static. In an app we

Stan is freedom-respecting, open-source software for facilitating statistical inference at the frontiers of applied statistics. Or to put it another way, it makes Bayesian inference fast and (a bit) easier. StanCon is the premier conference for all things Stan related and this year it will take place at the Asilomar Conference Grounds, a National Historic

Nested timings 1) Sys.time() 2) The tictoc package Comparing functions 1) system.time() 2) The microbenchmark package Conclusion As time goes on, your R scripts are probably getting longer and more complicated, right? Timing parts of your script could save you precious time when re-running code over and over again. Today I’m going to go through

Can’t be bothered reading, tell me now The wonder of CRAN Parallel package installation: Ncpus Does it work? A permanent change: .Rprofile References Can’t be bothered reading, tell me now A simple one line tweak can significantly speed up package installation and updates. The wonder of CRAN One of the best features of R is