Jupyter Notebooks with R in Azure Machine Learning Studio

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 Intelligence Gallery, either privately or publicly.

See notebooks in action

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

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See some sample notebooks

We have created some examples that demonstrates the possibilities:

You can find these notebooks, and others, in the Cortana Intelligence Gallery:

How to try the notebooks in Azure ML

You can try the notebook service, as well as all of the Azure ML Studio, using a free guest account.

1. Go to http://studio.azureml.net/
2. Click “Sign up”.
   • This will give you the option to use a guest account, a free account or a standard workspace
3. For completely anonymous access, choose “Guest Workspace”
   • However, note that in a guest workspace you won’t …read more

     Source:: r-bloggers.com