Best way to use R in Ruby

Question

I want to visualize some of my statistical caluclations in Ruby.

My problem is, that I can't find the right gem for that.

rsruby doesn't seem to be up-to-date and I can't install it in Ruby 1.9.2.

Do you know a way how to run the R commands in Ruby?

Rserve + http://rubygems.org/gems/rserve-simpler or http://opencpu.org/ — Hansi, Apr 10 '12 at 11:21
Similar to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9287265/r-statistical-package-gem-for-a-rails-application — Azolo, Apr 10 '12 at 17:31
Similar to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3686439/can-ruby-interface-with-r/14722213#14722213 — Steve Bennett, Feb 06 '13 at 09:34

score 40 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

40

I just saw this post and thought I should comment since I use R pretty extensively. If you are coming from an R background the best gem I have found is Rinruby. The reason it is fantastic is because you don't interpret the commands in ruby, you use actual R code. For example:

require "rinruby"      
#Set all your variables in Ruby
n = 10
beta_0 = 1
beta_1 = 0.25
alpha = 0.05
seed = 23423
R.x = (1..n).entries
#Use actual R code to perform the analysis
R.eval <<EOF
  set.seed(#{seed})
  y <- #{beta_0} + #{beta_1}*x + rnorm(#{n})
  fit <- lm( y ~ x )
  est <- round(coef(fit),3)
  pvalue <- summary(fit)$coefficients[2,4]
EOF

On the Rinruby website I listed above there are some fantastic examples to get you started. Hope this helped.

-Sean

edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

Community

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answered Jun 21 '12 at 15:33

Sean

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Sean, don't mince your words. Do you think it RinRuby is fantastic or not? – Cary Swoveland Oct 05 '14 at 18:08
@sean, is there a way to generate the graphs through the webpage instead of having them display in a R window? I'm using the Gettysburg example from the library's website for testing this currently... – daveomcd Jun 13 '15 at 16:27
@daveomcd It's been awhile..., but can't you just just render to PNG as your graphic device instead of an R window and then display the PNG? – bigtunacan Jul 12 '15 at 03:48
@bigtunacan yes I ended up saving it as a temporary png and the embedding in the page thanks! – daveomcd Jul 12 '15 at 03:49
What is the benefit of using R in ruby? Is it faster to execute this code using Rinruby versus just running it in R? – lrthistlethwaite Apr 25 '16 at 21:55
Definitely faster to just use R if you are doing stats stuff. You use r in ruby when you need to combine the two. My use case is that I execute the R code from inside ruby a ruby program to generate some visualizations that I then use/display elsewhere. – Sean Apr 26 '16 at 18:09

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 10 '12 at 14:45

As @Hansi mentioned, RServe is the best way I've found to run R remotely. If you're using Ruby from a web-context especially, RServe can offer some nice benefits.

Best of all (in my mind), you don't get locked into any one programming framework, as there are RServe clients for a variety of languages including Java and C++. When using web-accessible platforms, you can even keep Rserve running on a separate host and route traffic over TCP/IP for added security.

Best way to use R in Ruby

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