by Joseph Rickert As an avid newspaper reader (I still get the print edition of the New York Times delivered every Sunday morning) I have always thought that some of the most interesting news is to be found in the back pages. So, in that spirit here are some things ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert The following is a brief report of all things R encountered in my not quite random, but nevertheless far from determined, walk through the O'Reilly Strata / Hadoop World Conference held this week in NYC. To start off, I had the pleasure of doing a 9:00 AM Monday morning ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert We have been following sports statistics regularly on the Revolutions Blog with quite a few sports related posts this year. In one post I did back in April about the Latham R package for baseball statistics I speculated on how baseball was poised to move from Moneyball ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert The 2013 Mining Big Data Camp was held last Saturday at Ebay’s Town Hall Conference Center in San Jose. The San Francisco chapter of the ACM has been sponsoring this data mining themed, “un-conference” event since 2009. Attendance, this year was lighter than I remembered in the past, ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert Data Week 2013 is being held this week in sunny San Francisco at the Fort Mason conference center overlooking the Bay. Holding a Bay Area R User Group Meeting (BARUG) at Data Week helped to raise the R consciousness among the hip conference crowd attracted by the intoxicating ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert On October 1st, Revolution Analytics opens the 2014 season for sponsoring R user groups. Over the past few months we have seen quite a few new user groups start up and we expect the trend to continue into 2014. We hope that our 2014 sponsorship program will help to sustain ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert I don’t think that most people find reading the articles in the statistical journals to be easy going. In my experience, the going is particularly rough when trying to learn something completely new and I don’t expect it could be any other way. There is ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert At Revolution Analytics our mission is to establish R as the driver for Enterprise level computational frameworks. In part, this means that a data scientist ought to be able to develop an R based application in one context, e.g. her local PC, and then get it ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert I was recently looking through upcoming Coursera offerings and came across the course Coding the Matrix: Linear Algebra through Computer Science Applications taught by Philip Klein from Brown University. This looks like a fine course; but why use Python to teach linear algebra? I suppose this is ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert The world may indeed be awash with data, however, it is not always easy to find a suitable data set when you need one. As the number of people becoming involved with R and data science increases so does the need for interesting data sets for creating ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert When you not directly working in an industry it is often extremely difficult to get any real insight into common practices that may be blindly transparent to people who are. With some persistence though, every once in awhile you can stumble into an opportunity to see why ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert Every month I look forward to getting my copy of AMSTATNEWS, the monthly magazine of the American Statistical Association, in the mail. This July, I was both pleased and bemused by ASA President Marie Davidian’s article Aren’t We Data Science?. I was pleased to see ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert Early on, Revolution Analytics realized that R is more than just a tool for statistical computing — it is also the culture that has grown up around the use of the tool. The R culture is open and inclusive, competitive but also nourishing. There is a strong sense ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert It is very likely that even a very casual observer what is happening in the world of R these past few months would have come across some mention of Rcpp, the R package that greatly facilitates R and C++ integration. Rcpp is hot! Over 130 R packages now ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert The rxDTree() function included in the RevoScaleR package distributed with Revolution R Enterprise is an an example of a new class of algorithms that are being developed to deal with very large data sets. Although the particulars differ, what these algorithms have in common is the use ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert Late last Saturday afternoon I was reading in my usual spot at the Dana Street Coffee House in Mt. View. A stranger walking by my table noticed my copy of Madsen’s Time Series Analysis (sitting there untouched again) said he needed to learn something about time ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert The basic way to plot a classification or regression tree built with R’s rpart() function is just to call plot. However, in general, the results just aren’t pretty. As it turns out, for some time now there has been a better way to plot rpart() ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert Quandl.com, the open source website for financial data, made rapid progress earlier this year in becoming an R friendly source for financial time series data. Tammer Kamel, Quandl’s founder introduced the site on Revolutions blog in late February as a “search engine” for numerical data ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert Random number generation is fundamental to doing computational statistics. As you might expect, R is very rich in random number resources. The R base code provides several high quality random number generators including: Wichmann-Hill, Marsaglia-Multicarry, Super-Duper, Mersenne-Twister, Knuth-TAOCP-2002 and L’Ecuyer-CMRG. (See Random for details.) And, there ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert In a post last week, I offered some first impressions about R/Finance 2013. Apparently, I was way off in estimating that 30% of the attendees were academics. The R/Finance organizers were quick to point out that percentage of academics attending the conference has been a constant 10% over ... [Read more...]