by Joseph Rickert Tuesday's post on a new Kaggle contest mentioned that Revolution Analytics offers a free trial for using Revolution R Enterprise in the Amazon cloud. One reason this might be of interest to contestants is the rxImport() function which reads delimited text data, fixed format text data, and ... [Read more...]

by James P. Peruvankal Kaggle just announced a competition to predict which shoppers will become repeat buyers. To aid with algorithmic development, they have provided complete, basket-level, pre-offer shopping history for a large set of shoppers who were targeted for an acquisition campaign. Files containing the incentives offered to each ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert Pasha Roberts, Chief Scientist at Talent Analytics, is writing a series of articles on Employee Churn for the Predictive Analytics Times that comprise a really instructive and valuable example of using R to do some basic predictive modeling. So far, Pasha has published Employee Churn 201 in which ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert One of the remarkable features of the R language is its adaptability. Motivated by R’s popularity and helped by R’s expressive power and transparency developers working on other platforms display what looks like inexhaustible creativity in providing seamless interfaces to software that complements R’s ... [Read more...]

by Daniel Hanson Last time, we looked at the four-parameter Generalized Lambda Distribution, as a method of incorporating skew and kurtosis into an estimated distribution of market returns, and capturing the typical fat tails that the normal distribution cannot. Having said that, however, the Normal distribution can be useful in ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert The seven lightning talks presented to the Bay Area useR Group on Tuesday night were not only really interesting (in some cases downright entertaining) in their own right, but they also illustrated the diversity of R applications, and the extent to which R has become embedded in ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert Norman Matloff professor of computer science at UC Davis, and founding member of the UCD Dept. of Statistics has begun posting as Mad(Data)Scientist. (You may know Norm from his book, The Art of R Programming: NSP, 2011.) In his second post (out today) on the new ... [Read more...]

by Mike Bowles Mike Bowles is a machine learning expert and serial entrepreneur. This is the second post in what is envisioned as a four part series that began with Mike's Thumbnail History of Ensemble Models. One of the main reasons for using R is the vast array of high-quality ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert Generalized Linear Models have become part of the fabric of modern statistics, and logistic regression, at least, is a “go to” tool for data scientists building classification applications. The ready availability of good GLM software and the interpretability of the results logistic regression makes it a good ... [Read more...]

by Seth Mottaghinejad, Analytic Consultant for Revolution Analytics You may have heard before that R is a vectorized language, but what do we mean by that? One way to read that is to say that many functions in R can operate efficiently on vectors (in addition to singletons). Here are ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert Worldwide R user group activity for the first Quarter of 2014 appears to be way up compared to previous years as the following plot shows. The plot was built by counting the meetings on Revolution Analytics R Community Calendar. R users continue to value the live, in person ... [Read more...]

By Mike Bowles Ensemble methods are the backbone of machine learning techniques. However, it can be a daunting subject for someone approaching it for the first time, so we asked Mike Bowles, machine learning expert and serial entrepreneur to provide some context. Ensemble Methods are among the most powerful and ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert Recently, I had the opportunity to be a member of a job panel for Mathematics, Economics and Statistics students at my alma mater, CSUEB (California State University East Bay). In the context of preparing for a career in data science a student at the event asked: “Where ... [Read more...]

by James Paul Peruvankal, Senior Program Manager at Revolution Analytics At Revolution Analytics, we are always interested in how people teach and learn R, and what makes R so popular, yet ‘quirky’ to learn. To get some insight from a real pro we interviewed Bob Muenchen. Bob is the author ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert I am a book person. I collect books on all sorts of subjects that interest me and consequently I have a fairly extensive collection of R books, many of which I find to be of great value. Nevertheless, when I am asked to recommend an R book ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert In addition to the considerable benefit of being able to meet other, like-minded R users face-to-face, R user groups fill a niche in the world of R education by providing a forum for communicating technical information in an informal and engaging manner. Conferences such as useR!, JSM ... [Read more...]

by Rodney Sparapani, PhD Rodney is an Assistant Professor in the Institute for Health and Society from the Division of Biostatistics at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee and president of the Milwaukee Chapter of the ASA which is hosting an R workshop on Data Mining in Milwaukee on ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert After an end-of-year slow down in R user group acrtivity that lasted into mid January, the Revolution Analytics’ Community Calendar indicates that R user groups worldwide are back in full swing with 48 events listed in the short month of February. And, while the total number of active ... [Read more...]

by Daniel Hanson, QA Data Scientist, Revolution Analytics Introduction As most readers are well aware, market return data tends to have heavier tails than that which can be captured by a normal distribution; furthermore, skewness will not be captured either. For this reason, a four parameter distribution such as the ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert One of the key ideas in topological data analysis is to consider a data set to be a sample from a manifold in some high dimensional topological space and then to use the tools of algebraic topology to reconstruct the manifold. It turns out that the converse ... [Read more...]