In case you missed them, here are some articles from February of particular interest to R users.
Public policy researchers use R to predict neighbourhoods in US cities subject to gentrification .
Theggraph package provides a grammar-of-graphics framework for visualizing directed and undirected graphs.
Facebook has open-sourced the"prophet" package they use for forecasting time series at scale.
A preview of features coming soon to R Tools for Visual Studio 1.0 .
On the differences between using Excel and R for data analysis.
A data scientist suggests a "Gloom Index" for identifying the most depressing songs by the band Radiohead .
Catterplots is a package that replaces scatterplot points with cats. (Tufte would not approve.)
A collection of tips on using Microsoft R Server from the support team.
A summary of the many improvements slated for R 3.4.0 .
R code using the RevoScaleR package to classify a large database of galaxy images in SQL Server .
A review of four deep learning packages for R : MXNet, darch, deepnet and h2o.
An update on more than a dozen projects and community initiatives funded by R Consortium grants .
R has overtaken SAS for Statistics job listings on indeed.com.
ModernDive is a free online textbook on Statistics and data science using R.
A solution (with R code) for modeling customer churn in the retail industry using SQL Server R Services.
Thesuperheat package provides enhanced heatmap graphics for R.
Thefst package provides a new serialization format for R data focused on performance.
Thomas Dinsmore reflects on major events in the R Project and for Microsoft in 2016 .
And some general interest stories (not necessarily related to R):A big drain;'Vous' vs 'tu';a remembrance of the late Hans Rosling ; andTen Meter Tower, a short film.
As always, thanks for the comments and please send any suggestions to me at davidsmi@microsoft.com . Don't forget you can follow the blog using an RSS reader, via email using blogtrottr , or by following me on Twitter (I'm @revodavid ). You can find roundups of previous monthshere.