Forbes has published an article today on the integration between Alteryx and Revolution R Enterprise, which gives business analysts the ability to drag and drop to connect data sources to R-based models, such as this one for Market Basket analysis:
(Experienced R users can always drill down to see the code behind the analysis, as you can see in this video.) Not only will this be a great way for non-programmers to access the wealth of capabilities in R (even with very large data sets, thanks to Revolution R Enterprise), it's also a great way for R programmers to make their custom data visualizations and models available to business analysts, by adding new icons to the Alteryx palette, or by publishing new workflows to the Alteryx Gallery.
Bob Muenchen (author of R for SAS and SPSS Users) also comments on the promise of a drag-and-drop UI for R in his blog post, What R Has Been Missing.
To see better how this paradigm for programming R could work, check out Labview, National Instruments software for creating virtual instruments and analysis of scientific data. The graphic interface allows fast dataflow programming, without cramping the progammer's style when it comes to fine tuning. Sweet! When R has the equivalent, then it will be truly unbeatable.
Posted by: Alan Parker | October 20, 2013 at 08:22