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by Joseph Rickert Recently, I had the opportunity to present a webinar on R and Data Science. The challenge with attempting this sort of thing is to say something interesting that does justice to the subject while being suitable for an audience that may include both experienced R users and ... [Read more...]

The following post by Norm Matloff originally appeared on his blog, Mad(Data)Scientist, on September 15th. We rarely republish posts that have appeared on other blogs, however, the questions that Norm raises both with respect to the teaching of statistics, and his assertion that "R's statistical procedures are centered ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert One of the most difficult things about R, a problem that is particularly vexing to beginners, is finding things. This is an unintended consequence of R's spectacular, but mostly uncoordinated, organic growth. The R core team does a superb job of maintaining the stability and growth of ... [Read more...]

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by Joseph Rickert While preparing for the DataWeek R Bootcamp that I conducted this week I came across the following gem. This code, based directly on a Max Kuhn presentation of a couple years back, compares the efficacy of two machine learning models on a training data set. #----------------------------------------- # SET ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert The days are getting shorter here in California and the summer R conferences UseR!2014 and JSM are behind us, but there are still some very fine conferences for R users to look forward to before the year ends. DataWeek starts in San Francisco on September 15th. I ... [Read more...]

by Seth Mottaghinejad Let's review the Collatz conjecture, which says that given a positive integer n, the following recursive algorithm will always terminate: if n is 1, stop, otherwise recurse on the following if n is even, then divide it by 2 if n is odd, then multiply it by 3 and add 1 ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert The ancient Egyptians were a people with long memories. The lists of their pharaohs went back thousands of years, and we still have the names and tax assessments for certain persons and institutions from the time of Ramesses II. When Herodotus began writing about Egypt and the ... [Read more...]

by Don Boyd, Senior Fellow, Rockefeller Institute of Government The Rockefeller Institute of Government is excited to be developing models to simulate the finances of public pension funds, using R. Public pension funds invest contributions from governments and public sector workers in an effort to ensure that they can pay ... [Read more...]

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...]