Jupyter Notebooks with R in Azure Machine Learning Studio

By Andrie de Vries

by Andrie de Vries

Earlier today Microsoft announced that Jupyter Notebooks are now available with the R Kernel as a service in Azure Machine Learning (ML) Studio.

I wrote about Jupyter Notebooks in September 2015 (Using R with Jupyter Notebooks), where I noted some of the great benefits of using notebooks:

• Jupyter is an easy to use and convenient way of mixing code and text in the same document.
• Unlike other reporting systems like RMarkdown and LaTex, Jupyter notebooks are interactive – you can run the code snippets directly in the document
• This makes it easy to share and publish code samples as well as reports.

This new announcement is that Jupyter Notebooks with R are now a feature of the Azure Machine Learning Studio. This means:

1. You can create and edit R notebooks directly in the Azure ML cloud, without having to create virtual machines.
2. Using the AzureML R package, you can interact between R notebooks and your Azure ML environment. Specifically, you can:
   • Download and upload datasets
   • Download intermediate datasets from Azure ML experiments
   • Publish and consume web services
3. You can easily publish your notebook in the Cortana Analytics Gallery, either privately or publicly.

See notebooks in action

This video has a gentle introduction on how to use Jupyter Notebooks:

See some sample notebooks

We have created some examples that demonstrates the possibilities:

• Introduction to Azure ML R notebooks
• Predicting breast cancer using data from AzureML
• Changing R plot options in Jupyter
• Accessing datasets with R using the AzureML R package
• Connect Azure ML Studio with R using the AzureML package
• Fitting a Gradient Boosting Machine (GBM) and publishing to AzureML using R
• Fitting a LASSO regression model and publishing to Azure ML using R

You can find these notebooks, and others, in the Cortana …read more

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