The most recent edition of the Revolution Newsletter is now available. In case you missed it, the news section is below, and you can read the full August edition (with highlights from this blog and community events) online. You can subscribe to the Revolution Newsletter to get it monthly via ... [Read more...]

If, like me, you've ever had a sandwich from a dubious deli and then been laid up for days afterwards, you know that food poisoning is no trifling matter. In the past, local authorities would only ever learn of such public health issues if they get reported to the authorities ... [Read more...]

Australian Rules Football (AFL) isn't what Americans know as football. Nor is it what Europeans know as football (and the rest of the world calls soccer). Nor is it rugby. Here's what AFL looks like: As a unique game in its own right, it deserves its own kind of data ... [Read more...]

Here's a new picture of the devastation wrought by Katrina in 2005. This image shows the maximum wind speeds of the hurricane, not at any particular point of time, but over the duration of the entire storm: The data come from NOAA's H*Wind project, which makes windspeed data from sensors ... [Read more...]

If you're an absolute beginner to the R language, this Intro to R video series from Google Developers is a great place to get started. Just download R for your system, start the playlist below, and follow along with the on-screen examples. (The video uses the MacOS X version of ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from July of particular interest to R users: A new 90-second, creative commons video helps R enthusiasts share the history, community and applications of R. Analyst group Butler Analytics reviews 10 predictive analytics platforms, and says that "real analysts use R". An ... [Read more...]

This guest post is by Punit Kulkarni. Punit is the Director of Marketing at Symphony Analytics and a marketing technology enthusiast. He has helped Fortune 500 retailers and brands in building their customer loyalty programs, direct marketing and business analytics. As a trusted co-marketing partner of Revolution Analytics, Symphony Analytics is ... [Read more...]

This guest post is by Rodolfo Vanzini. Rodolfo is senior partner at eXponential.it — an asset management consultancy based in Italy — and advises clients on investment management issues. He taught at the University of Siena and is an analytics professional. With an economist education and a financial markets expertise four ... [Read more...]

Back in May, Twitter's Miguel Rios created some beautiful data visualizations to show that with enough (i.e. billions) of geotagged tweets, you can reveal the geography of where people live, work and commute. Now, a new interactive visualization of 210 million geotagged tweets by AT&T Research Labs reveals the ... [Read more...]

Job-tracking site indeed.com shows the rate at which certain terms appear in job advertisements. As you can see from the chart below, demand for R language skills is on the rise, while the number of SAS-related job postings peaked in late 2010 and has been declining steadily since early 2012. I ... [Read more...]

In an overview of several predictive analytics platforms (including SPSS, Oracle and SAS), Butler Analytics offers this 4.5/5 star review of Revolution R Enterprise: Real analysts use R – well it sounds a bit macho, but actually there is some truth in it. R is the most widely used, and arguably the ... [Read more...]

A byte-compiler for R code — which can improve the execution performance of R functions — was introduced in R 2.13.0, and was automatically applied to the bundled packages in R 2.14.0. Drew Dimmery provides some good advice for identifying targets amongst your own R functions for compilation: I have some function that will ... [Read more...]

We meet a lot of R users on our travels, and something we often hear from them is that while they're doing amazing things with R (incredible data visualizations, statistical analysis, and data science applications), their supervisors or peers may not know that the R language is involved, or that ... [Read more...]

Many cities around the world have bike sharing programs: pick up a bike at a docking station, ride it across town and drop it off at another session, and just pay for the time you use. (Even Albacete, the Spanish college down hosting last month's UseR conference, had one.) Most ... [Read more...]

O'Reilly Media has published a new whitepaper, Real-Time Big Data Analytics: Emerging Architecture. This 32-page document describes the processes and components necessary for getting on-demand information from big-data stores such as Hadoop. It answers the questions "How fast is fast?" and "How real is real-time?" and "how big is big?", ... [Read more...]

Thomas Levine has put together a handy list of "data spells" for R: all of those cool, slightly hacky ways of getting things done with R that you might not come across in the standard documentation. Check out the link below for handy hints o... [Read more...]

I'm a bit late catching up on this, but Mario Inchosa (Revolution Analytics US Chief Scientist) gave a standing-room-only talk on high-performance predictive analytics in R and Hadoop at last month's Hadoop Summit. In the talk, he described some of the progress we've made integrating the ScaleR parallel external-memory algorithms ... [Read more...]

The most recent edition of the Revolution Newsletter came out a couple of weeks ago. In case you missed it, the news section is below, and you can read the full July edition (with highlights from this blog and community events) online. You can subscribe to the Revolution Newsletter to ... [Read more...]

This Wednesday at 11AM Eastern Time, Revolution Analytics UK Business Services Director Andrie DeVries will present a new webinar, Using Survival Analysis for Marketing Attribution. This webinar will focus on a new application of survival analysis (more traditionally used for life sciences application) to the domain of marketing: A central ... [Read more...]

Steve Scott (Google) presents at useR! 2013, July 12 2013 The 2013 UseR! conference has drawn to a close in Albacete, Spain. The conference organizers did a fantastic job putting together a jam-packed presentation and social program for the 350+ R users in attendance. Here are just a few of my highlights from the last ... [Read more...]