by Joseph Rickert In the first half of 2014, worldwide R user group activity continued to increase, showing impressive growth over the same periods for the past couple of years. For the last four months, the pace has been over 50 meetings per month. n There are now 147 user groups listed in ... [Read more...]

by Norman Matloff The American Statistical Association (ASA) leadership, and many in Statistics academia. have been undergoing a period of angst the last few years, They worry that the field of Statistics is headed for a future of reduced national influence and importance, with the feeling that: The field is ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert We are pleased to announce that Jo-fai Chow is the winner of the Revolution Analytics contest. Jo-fai’s entry, which was implemented as a Shiny project, may be viewed by clicking on the figure below. Jo-fai’s work not only produced an aesthetically pleasing sequence of maps ... [Read more...]

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by Joseph Rickert I think we can be sure that when American botanist Edgar Anderson meticulously collected data on three species of iris in the early 1930s he had no idea that these data would produce a computational storm that would persist well into the 21st century. The calculations started, ... [Read more...]

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by Joseph Rickert Last week, I posted a list of sessions at the Joint Statistical Meetings related to R. As it turned out, that list was only the tip of the iceberg. In some areas of statistics, such as graphics, simulation and computational statistics the use of R is so ... [Read more...]

Using package repositories to recreate the past, distribute the present, and protect against the future by Gabriel Becker (@groundwalkergmb) Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Genentech Research and Early Developmen 1. Have you ever needed to reach into the distant past … to recreate a years old result? Take - as an arbitrary example ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert The Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) get underway this weekend in Boston and Revolution Analytics is again proud to be a sponsor. More than 6,000 statisticians and data scientists from around the world are expected to attend and listen to thousands of presentations. It is true that many talks ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert If I had to pick just one application to be the “killer app” for the digital computer I would probably choose Agent Based Modeling (ABM). Imagine creating a world populated with hundreds, or even thousands of agents, interacting with each other and with the environment according to ... [Read more...]

by James Peruvankal There are plenty of options if you want to learn R and are looking for training: your college’s statistics department, massive open online courses like Coursera, Udacity, edX, Datacamp etc. SiliconANGLE recently published an article about top R-training companies. Let’s talk about how to choose ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert Broadly speaking, a meta-analysis is any statistical analysis that attempts to combine the results of several individual studies. The term was apparently coined by statistician Gene V Glass in a 1976 speech he made to the American Education Research Association. Since that time, not only has meta-analysis become ... [Read more...]

by Yaniv Mor, Co-founder & CEO of Xplenty How do you get Big Data ready for R? Gigabytes or terabytes of raw data may need to be combined, cleaned, and aggregated before they can be analyzed. Processing such large amounts of data used to require installing Hadoop on a cluster of ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert John Chambers opened UseR! 2014 by describing how the R language grew out of early efforts to give statisticians easier access to high quality statistical software. In 1976 computational statistics was a very active field, but most algorithms were compiled as Fortran subroutines. Building models with this software was ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert UserR! 2014 got under way this past Monday with a very impressive array of tutorials delivered on the day that the conferences organizers were struggling to cope with a record breaking crowd. My guess is that conference attendance is somewhere in the 700 range. Moreover, this the first year ... [Read more...]

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by Joseph Rickert Predictive Modeling or “Predictive Analytics”, the term that appears to be gaining traction in the business world, is driving the new “Big Data” information economy. Predictably, there is no shortage of material to be found on this subject. Some discussion of predictive modeling is sure to be ... [Read more...]

by Wayne Smith, Ph.D. California State University, Northridge Editor's note: This post was abstracted from the monthly newsletter of the Southern California Chapter of the ASA. On May 13th and 14th, the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (Intel ISEF) the world’s largest international pre-college competition, was held ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert For the past year or so we have been plotting the location of R user groups around the world using code (Download RUGS) adapted from a solution that Sandy Muspratt originally posted on Stack Overflow. In last week’s post, we made a modest improvement to our ... [Read more...]

by Ilya Kipnis In this post, I will demonstrate how to obtain, stitch together, and clean data for backtesting using futures data from Quandl. Quandl was previously introduced in the Revolutions Blog. Functions I will be using can be found in my IK Trading package available on my github page. ... [Read more...]