Peer to Peer Magazine

62 PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE OF ILTA | SPRING 2016 FEATURES The Analytic Power of R for Decision-Making The Price Is Right R is available for free for all uses, including commercial. Your data remains yours and never leaves your local machine. In addition to significant built-in functionality, there are thousands of packages available to solve common data problems. Some of the most useful tools available via the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) are: » XML: Scraping the Web for data » Shiny: Creating interactive Web applications with your data » Ggplot2 and Laice: Creating beer-looking charts and graphs » Caret: Accessing hundreds of machine learning algorithms that can find trends and help with predictions » dplyr: Handling data tables easily (it adds selection and filter functions to R and makes your code more intuitive to write and easier to read) » knitr: Creating reports that combine your code and output, allowing you to show the steps taken to get to the conclusion of your analysis and save your document to a number of formats » stringr: Working with text strings to simplify things like spliing off individual words and leers These and thousands of more applications can all be installed from within R. Powerful Analytics Capitalizing on knowledge hidden within large sums of data can drive strategic advantage for your business. R might have a steep learning curve, but using such a data-based approach allows for informed decision- making and helps you avoid costly mistakes, discover new opportunities and develop solid strategies to drive improved performance. P2P Microsoft is beginning to put a lot of weight behind R. They bought a company called Revolution Analytics and are putting out their own version called Microsoft R Open. In addition, R is going to be available as a part of Azure, as a plugin for Visual Studio, packaged with Microsoft SQL Server 2016. It eventually will be added into Excel. I'm very excited about this, and I just went to a demo at the Pittsburgh Microsoft offices this past month, and they're doing great things. It's a good sign that professionals will have easier access to R…it might even gain mainstream appeal. R IS COMING TO MICROSOFT

• Cover