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(This article was first published on <strong><a href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/01/the-biggest-r-stories-from-2016.html"> Revolutions</a></strong>, and kindly contributed to <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/">R-bloggers)</a> </div>
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<p>It's been another great year for the R project and the R community. Let's look at some of the highlights from 2016.</p>
<p><a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://revolution-computing.typepad.com/.a/6a010534b1db25970b01b8d24d4cf1970c-pi"><img title="Rlogo" alt="Rlogo" src="http://revolution-computing.typepad.com/.a/6a010534b1db25970b01b8d24d4cf1970c-800wi" border="0"></a>The <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/05/r-330-now-available.html">R 3.3 major release</a> brought some significant performance improvements to R, along with a spiffy new logo. There were also two updates in 2016: <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/06/r-331-now-available.html">R 3.3.1</a> and <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/10/r-332-now-available.html">R 3.3.2</a>. (The R 3.2 series also received an update with <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/03/r-324-released.html">R 3.2.4</a>.) The R Foundation accepted <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-announce/2016/000609.html">five new members</a>, and R-core accepted a <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-announce/2016/000610.html">new contributor</a> as well. </p>
<p>R’s popularity continued to grow in 2016, as measured by the <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/09/2016-data-science-salary-survey.html">2016 O'Reilly Data Science Salary Survey</a> (57%), <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/07/r-moves-up-to-5th-place-in-ieee-language-rankings.html">IEEE Spectrum</a> (5<sup>th</sup> rank), and <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/06/r-holds-top-ranking-in-kdnuggets-software-poll.html">KDNuggets</a> (1<sup>st</sup> rank).</p>
<p>The network of R user groups <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="https://twitter.com/revodavid/status/783405682976395264">expanded</a> to more than 250 worldwide, bolstered by the rapidly-growing <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/09/all-the-r-ladies.html">R-ladies network</a>. The useR!2016 conference was a major success with fascinating <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/07/rick-becker-s-talk.html">keynotes</a>, 128 contributed talks (<a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/06/livestreaming-of-user-2016-conference.html">livestreamed</a> and <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/useR-international-R-User-conference/useR2016">recorded</a> for the first time) <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/06/the-r-packages-of-user-2016.html">covering 154 packages</a>, and a free <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/06/the-user-2016-tutorials.html">tutorial</a> <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/07/user-2016-tutorials-part-2-.html">series</a>.</p>
<p>The R Consortium was very active in 2016, adding new <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-consortium.org/members">members</a> <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/06/r-news.html">IBM</a> and <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://www.computerworld.com/article/3123783/enterprise-applications/esri-joins-r-consortium.html">ESRI</a>, <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-consortium.org/projects/awarded-projects">awarding several grants</a> for R community projects and working groups, and launching the <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/10/r-hub-public-beta.html">R-hub project</a>.</p>
<p>R analyses were featured in several major news stories, including ones about <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/08/sentiment-analysis-of-trumps-tweets-with-r.html">Donald Trump's vs his staffers' tweets</a>, <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/10/debate-emotions.html">conduct in the presidential debates</a>, the <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/08/interactive-illustrator-quality-graphics-with-r.html">Rio Olympics</a>, issues with <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/10/statcheck.html">reproducibility in Psychology</a>, and the <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/04/the-fbis-aerial-surveillance-program-visualized-with-r.html">FBI aerial surveillance program</a>.</p>
<p>Microsoft continued to make major investments in R in 2016, not least <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/03/sql-server-2016-launch.html">integration of SQL Server and R</a>, support for Spark 2.0 and HDInsight for <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/12/microsoft-r-server-90-now-available.html">Microsoft R Server</a>, the <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/10/the-team-data-science-process.html">Team Data Science Process</a>, <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/08/powerbi-and-r.html">R support in PowerBI</a>, and the new <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/07/microsoft-r-client.html">Microsoft R Client</a>, <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/04/microsoft-ds-vm-linux.html">Data Science Virtual Machine</a> in Azure, and <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/03/rtvs-preview.html">R Tools for Visual Studio</a>.</p>
<p>The RStudio team released <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/11/rstudio-v10-released.html">RStudio v1.0</a> and several packages for R, notably the <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/09/tidyverse.html">Tidyverse</a> collection of packages for working with data in R.</p>
<p>And to wrap up, the Revolutions blog was also very active in 2016 with a 23% increase in both pageviews and users compared to 2015. Here are the top 10 stories from 2016, as measured by pageviews:</p>
<ul>
<li><a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/02/japans-ageing-population-animated-with-r.html">Japan's ageing population, animated with R</a></li>
<li><a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/01/microsoft-r-open.html">Revolution R renamed Microsoft R, available free to developers and students</a></li>
<li><a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/09/fraud-detection.html">Using R to detect fraud at 1 million transactions per second</a></li>
<li><a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/01/r-coming-to-visual-studio.html">R coming to Visual Studio</a></li>
<li><a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/07/microsoft-r-client.html">Introducing the free Microsoft R Client</a></li>
<li><a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/01/twitter-sentiment.html">In-depth analysis of Twitter activity and sentiment, with R</a></li>
<li><a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/01/getting-started-with-markov-chains.html">Getting Started with Markov Chains</a></li>
<li><a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/08/deep-learning-part-2.html">Deep Learning Part 2: Transfer Learning and Fine-tuning Deep Convolutional Neural Networks</a></li>
<li><a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/07/an-analysis-of-pok%C3%A9mon-go-types-created-with-r.html">An analysis of Pokémon Go types, created with R</a></li>
<li><a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/02/using-mro-with-rstudio.html">Using Microsoft R Open with RStudio</a></li>
</ul>
<p>The ML/DL blog also features a <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="https://thomaswdinsmore.com/2017/01/02/the-year-in-machine-learning-part-two/">roundup of 2016 news</a> from the R Project, Python, and other open source data science tools.</p>
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