use R! 2010 conference — reflections

From July 20-23, this year’s use R! conference took place in Gaithersburg near Washington. I attended the conference as part of my holidays in the
U.S. and had a good time there. I met some people, even though that is not the easiest thing for me to do, and I got some inspirations and ideas
I outline below:

Stat apps

One speaker mentioned „stat apps” as the new buzz. This caught my attention. One „stat app” example that comes to my mind is
Gapminder, which is both a web app and a desktop app. „Stat apps” seen at UseR 2010 include

• Tibco Spotfire, a commercial product that offers specialized non-R GUIs that may communicate with an R server. The GUI follows
  a tabbed notebook concept with tabs like „raw data”, „filter”, „regression/scatterplot”, „cartographic map”.


• Zubin Dowlaty from Mu Sigma showed how to integrate R in an Event Driven Architecture.
  The examples presented by Dowlaty were on analysing Twitter streams and TWS financial data. The GUI was developed with Adobe Flex, the
  event routing was delegated to Apache Camel.
  Processing real-time video data was an example presented by John Emerson, using the R packages openCV, bigmemory and synchronicity.


• RCmdr, a Tcl/Tk application with a plugin system, for instance the EViews-inspired rcommanderplugin.Econometrics by Dedi Rosadi


• red-r.org, an qt/rpy based application with focus on visualizing the analysis path

Topics in data analysis I want to learn more about

• spatial data analysis, eg nearest neighbor ideas (Mark Hancock draws a connection to Actor Markov statistics) or
  creating cartograms for dyadic data (rubber sheet algorithm, circles algorithm (R), Newman-Gastner diffusion method (as mentioned
  by Benjamin Mazzotta)


• index decomposition analysis, a quick question on
  stats.stackexchange.com
  revealed that there seem to be
  only partial implementations out there (R packages micEcon and micEconAids, by way of demand analysis).

Misc. Thoughts

• Create a movie of plots using quicktime or swfDevice, swf()!


• How to transfer Excel’s pivot table concept to R? What’s a grammar of tables?


• There are user groups in D.C., New York, Basel, London. Where is the Berlin R user group?


• r2lh — nice package for creating uni- and bivariate analysis. Could this be used in Tk setting?

Some web sites that were new to me:

• http://www.worldmapper.org,


• http://www.tables2graphs.com,


• http://benmazzotta.wordpress.com,


• http://statbandit.wordpress.com,


• http://yihui.name.