In discussion with several data scientists, Will Stanton (a data scientist with Return Path) learned that a common concern is: what software should I be using? There are many options out there, but what is the best platform to be an effective "data hacker"? Will recommends using a technology stack ... [Read more...]

You're probably familiar with the classic Travelling Salesman problem: given (say) 20 cities, what is shortest route you can take that passes through all 20 cities and returns to the starting point? It's a difficult problem to solve, because you need to try all possible routes to find the minimum, and there ... [Read more...]

A quick heads up that if you'd like to get a great introduction to doing data science with the R language, Joe Rickert will be giving a free webinar next Thursday, September 25: Data Science with R. Regular readers of the blog will be familiar with Joe's posts on this topic. ... [Read more...]

I'm speaking at the DataWeek conference in San Francisco today. My talk follows Skylar Lyon from Accenture — I'm really looking forward to hearing how he uses Revolution R Enterprise with Teradata Database to run R in-database with 400 million rows of data. Update: Here are Skylar's slides. The slides for my ... [Read more...]

The R Foundation for Statistical Computing, the Vienna-based non-profit organization that oversees the R Project, has just added several new "ordinary members". (Ordinary members participate in R Foundation meetings and provide guidance to the project.) The new members are: Dirk Eddelbuettel, Torsten Hothorn, Marc Schwartz, Hadley Wickham, and Achim Zeileis, ... [Read more...]

Graduate student Clay McLeod decided to find out what makes a post on the social-sharing site Reddit popular. These are the questions he seeks to answer: What’s in a post? Reddit pulls in around 115 million unique visitors each month, amassing a staggering 5 billion page views per month. For a ... [Read more...]

Google has just released a new package for R: CausalImpact. Amongst many other things, this package allows Google to resolve the classical conundrum: how can we asses the impact of an intervention (for example, the effect of an advertising campaign on website clicks) when we can't know what would have ... [Read more...]

DataScience.LA has posted a great recap of the latest LA R meetup, which in turn was a recap of presentations from the useR! 2014 conference. Follow that link to review slides from the event, whith summaries of useR! 2014 related to R and Python; Finance; dplyr; R books; SalesForce and R ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from August of particular interest to R users: R is the most popular software in the KDNuggets poll for the 4th year running. The frequency of R user group meetings continues to rise, and there are now 147 R user groups worldwide. ... [Read more...]

As more companies explore the benefits that Hadoop may provide, the opportunities to better understand the technology are myriad and unequal. As a provider of in-Hadoop analytics, Revolution Analytics is participating in the coming Hortonworks seminar series. We will be on site to discuss how to deploy R-based analytics within ... [Read more...]

KDNuggests asked its readers the question "What programming/statistics languages you used for an analytics / data mining / data science work in 2014?" and one again, R was the #1 response. (R was also the #1 response in similar polls in 2013, 2012 and 2011.) The top 5 selections of the 719 respondents were: R (352 respondents) SAS (262) Python (252) SQL (220) ... [Read more...]

While I was in LA for the useR! 2014 conference last month, I had the great pleasure of being among the participants in the DataScienceLA interview series hosted by Eduardo Ariño de la Rubia. Eduardo is both an R user and an excellent interviewer: his preparation and knowledge of R ... [Read more...]

This entire movie — images, music, everything — is generated from a Windows PC executable of just 4,095 bytes. That's not a typo: we're not talking bytes not megabytes or gigabytes here. Less than 4kb total creates this entire scene. For comparison, a medium-quality video file of this exact same scene in AVI ... [Read more...]

By Neera Talbert, VP Services and Ben Wiley, R Programmer at Revolution Analytics By now, everyone should be familiar with the data scientist boom. Simply logging onto LinkedIn reveals a seemingly infinite number of people with words and phrases like “Data Scientist”, “Big Data Specialist”, and “Analytics” in their title. ... [Read more...]

Hilary Parker has contributed a lovely article to Significance, the magazine of the American Statistical Association and the Royal Statistical Society, on using R to set your Google calendar to mark the time of sunsets. Hilary details the process in the article, but the basic idea is to use the ... [Read more...]

A New York Times article yesterday discovers the 80-20 rule: that 80% of a typical data science project is sourcing cleaning and preparing the data, while the remaining 20% is actual data analysis. The article gives short shrift to this important task by calling it "janitorial work", but whether you call it ... [Read more...]

If you're looking for just the right package to solve your R problem, you could always browse through the list of available packages on CRAN. But with almost 6000 entries, that's not going to be the most efficient process. And even then, many very useful packages aren't found on CRAN: there ... [Read more...]

A statistical consultant known only as "Stanford PhD" has put together a table comparing the statistical capabilities of the software packages R, Matlab, SAS, Stata and SPSS. For each of 57 methods (including techniques like "ridge regression", "survival analysis", "optimization") the author ranks the capabilities of each software package as "Yes" (... [Read more...]

Joe wrote about this already, but now the recording of John Chambers' keynote presentation from the useR! 2014 conference, Interfaces, Efficiency and Big Data, is now available for viewing thanks to Data Science LA. In the video, John dives into the history of the S language for which he won the ... [Read more...]

So says CIO.com, in a recent article 11 Market Trends in Advanced Analytics. R, an open source programming language for computational statistics, visualization and data is becoming a ubiquitous tool in advanced analytics offerings. Kirsch says nearly every top vendor of advanced analytics has integrated R into their offering and ... [Read more...]