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Running Apache Spark with sparklyr and R in Windows

3 min. read RStudio recently released the sparklyr package that allows users to connect to Apache Spark instances from R. In addition, this package offers dplyr integration, allowing you to utilize Spark as you use dplyr functions like filter and select, which is very convenient. The package will also assist you in downloading and installing Apache Spark if […]

SG elections – a Twitter snapshot

3 min. read With the election fever ongoing in Singapore, let’s take a snapshot of the popular tweets with the hashtag #ge2015 at this point of time. library(twitteR) consumerKey <- readLines("twitterkey.txt") consumerSecret <- readLines("twittersecret.txt") accessToken <- readLines("twitteraccesstoken.txt") accessTokenSecret <- readLines("twitteraccesstokensecret.txt") setup_twitter_oauth(consumerKey,consumerSecret,accessToken,accessTokenSecret) ## [1] "Using direct authentication" tweets <- searchTwitter("#ge2015", resultType="popular", n=100) tweetsdf <- twListToDF(tweets) library(dplyr) tweetsdf <- tbl_df(tweetsdf) […]

stringAsFactors – a brief history

< 1 min. read If you have used R’s read.csv function, you will inevitably use the stringsAsFactors=FALSE option. Roger Peng offers a brief history into why the default for stringAsFactors option is TRUE. Alternatively, you can use the read_csv function from the readr package by Hadley Wickham, which does not automatically convert characters to factors.

Definition of Statistical Significance

< 1 min. read Note to self: Statistical Significance as defined by Andrew Gelman in his blog post. Statistical Significance Definition: A mathematical technique to measure the strength of evidence from a single study. Statistical significance is conventionally declared when the p-value is less than 0.05. The p-value is the probability of seeing a result as strong as observed […]