Using R Machine Learning Script as a Power BI Desktop Data Source - Simple Talk

You can expand the analytical potential of a BI tool by embedding, or providing a seamless interface to advanced analytics engines such as R. It is not a new idea: some BI vendors such as Tableau have already tried to boost the analytical capabilities of their BI tools through integration with R, but the way Tableau has done it is far from perfect because they connect to R through calculated fields. The R calculations have to be wrapped into some Tableau functions that are designed to support the integration and which, in turn, pass values to R via the Rserve package. To put it simply, Tableau Desktop relies on having an extra software layer between it and R. This article demonstrates a contrasting approach. It shows how to develop a Power BI Dashboard that uses an R machine-learning script as its data source. Despite of the simplicity of the example and of the data sources, it shows most of the typical phases of the BI dashboard development.