7th Meeting of Spanish R Users. 5-6 November 2015. Salamanca (Spain)

By Virgilio Gómez Rubio, Spanish R Users Organizing Committee

As every autumn since 2009, Spanish R users gathered at their annual meeting. It is organised by Spanish R users group ‘Comunidad R-Hispano’and took place in 5-6 November in the historic city of Salamanca. The 7th Meeting of Spanish R Users attracted more than 100 R entusiasts and provided a mix of tutorials and contributed talks within the quarters of the University of Salamanca.

First of all, from Comunidad R-Hispano we would like to thanks our sponsors Revolution Analytics, Telefónica, Instituto de Ingeniería del Conocimiento, Open Sistemas and Datatons for their financial support. Publishers Springer, Wiley and CRC/Taylor & Francis also supported this meeting by providing flyers, discounts and samples of recent books.

Tutorials presented at the conference covered topics such as R on Spark, the analysis of data from telephone surveys, analysis of survival data,analysis of data obtained from randomised surveys, analysis of network data with igraph and how to use R for the analysis of questionnaire data. All these tutorials provided a hands-on approach to the subject and the materials are available from the conference website.

Contributed talks focused on four main areas: Applications, Interfaces/Data Mining, Statistical Methodology and Biostatistics. Altogether, there were 22 oral presentations on these topics.

Among the Applications, Marcos Fernández Arias showed how to use R to gather information available on-line to pay a fair price for a new car.Teresa González Arteaga also shared some of her teaching experiences with R in a Degree in Statistics. In the Interfaces/Data Mining section, Christian González Martel and co-authors explored the use of R to use Wikipedia searches of top Spanish companies for investment in the Spanish stock market.

Regarding the contributed session on Statistical Methodology, José Luis Vicente Villardón talked about his experience migrating his code for multivariate analysis using biplots from Matlab to R. Finally, in the Biostatistics section, Carlos Prieto and co-authors presented some interactive plots developed with R and other tools to visualize genomic data.

The prize to the best presentation by a young presenter was awarded to Karel López Quintero for his work on a Price Sensitivity Meter (PSM) with R.

Comunidad R-Hispano is already preparing the 8th Meeting that will take place in November 2016, in the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Albacete and it will be locally organised by the same team that took care of useR! 2013.