Attended and thoroughly enjoyed Tuesday night’s New England R Users Group. We meet monthly in the Boston area to discuss the various ways in which people use and interact with the R programming language. Not surprisingly, we have a variety of industries represented. One of us is using R to recognize patterns in tissue samples to indicate the formation of tumors. Another is looking into how super computers can be used with R to enhance data analysis. Others, from the finance world, use tick data (over 80 GB in size) to make inferences about different securities in the stock market. The list goes on. Clearly we have a very diverse group!

One common issue many of our member’s face is how to deal with big data sets. Obviously there are various packages available related to this issue such as ff and bigmemory. However, most of us have limited knowledge on how to actually utilize these resources. Thus, our next meeting will have some short presentations providing a general overview of the various approaches to dealing with big data sets. I am looking forward to it and am sure it will be insightful.