Chapter 5. Forecasting with R

R is a popular programming language for statisticians and data scientists. This is primarily due to its popularity with students and professors in the academic world. R is a free and open source language that can be taught in any statistics class with minimal difficulty.

Within the last couple of years, R has creeped into the business intelligence landscape due to the integration of R with enterprise and desktop visualization tools such as Microsoft Power BI and Tableau. During this same period, many academics transitioned from research into the corporate world, and with them came their knowledge of R. While R is known for its predictive capabilities, many are surprised to find that it is a great visualization tool with many libraries, made available by its vast community, such as ggplot2.

In addition to the influx of R into the workforce, the introduction of RStudio into the market in 2011 brought added exposure to R. As we noted earlier in Chapter 2, Web Scraping...