by Joseph Rickert On May 10th and 11th, in honor of this being the International Year of Statistics, the Milwaukee Chapter of the American Statistical Association (MILWASA) held a workshop on cutting edge uses of R in Bioinformatics. One objective of the workshop was to show the "nuts and bolts" ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert This past Saturday, the New Frontiers in Computing Conference (NFIC 2013), held at Stanford University, explored the theme: Social Network Analysis: It’s Who You Know. The speakers were a well-chosen, eclectic lot who covered a remarkable array of issues in less than a full day. Ian Hersey, ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert Even a casual glance at the R Community Calendar shows an impressive amount of R user group activity throughout the world: 45 events in April and 31 scheduled so far for May. New groups formed last month in Knoxville, Tennessee (The Knoxville R User Group: KRUG) and Sheffield in ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert Saturday morning I was drinking my coffee wondering how much effort goes into R worldwide. (It’s my job.) I noticed that there were 4469 packages on CRAN, and it occurred to me that tabulating the packages by publication date would give some indication of how much effort ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert Baseball fans have been serious about statistics since Carl Pearson was a young man (although I doubt that Carl followed the game). It is not clear, though, exactly when baseball statisticians moved from doing descriptive stats into predictive analytics. In his book Super Crunchers, Ian Ayers credits ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert In a recent blog post, Revolution's Thomas Dinsmore announced stepwise regression for big data as a new feature of Revolution R Enterprise 6.2 that is scheduled for general availability later this month. Today, I would like to provide a simple example of doing stepwise regression with rxLinMod() (the ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert I am beginning to get excited about going to Spain for useR 2013 which will be held at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, so I have been using the links on the Revolution's local user directory webpage to see what the European R user groups are doing. Here ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert Life decisions are usually much too complicated to be attributed to any single cause, but one important reason that I am here at Revolution today is that I ignored suggestions from well-meaning faculty back in graduate school to work more in SAS rather than doing everything in ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert R user groups seem to be sprouting all over. Since last September we have noticed ten new groups worldwide: Auckland, New Zealand: Auckland-R-Users-Group (AKLRUG) had 33 people attend their March 8th meeting Chang Mai Thailand: Chang Mai is the first R user group in Thailand Durban, South Africa: ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert When talking with data scientists and analysts — who are working with large scale data analytics platforms such as Hadoop — about the best way to do some sophisticated modeling task it is not uncommon for someone to say, "We have all of the data. Why not just use ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert If you type ?Distributions at the R console you get a list of the 21 probability distributions included in the stats package that ships with base R. The same list appears in the Introduction to R Manual on CRAN and in most of the many fine introductory books ... [Read more...]

by Joseph B. Rickert It is difficult to imagine that there is anyone on the planet with an internet connection and a desire to learn something new who has not at least looked into taking a massive open online course (MOOC). Last Fall, in an 11/4/12 article, the New York Time ... [Read more...]

A common criticism of R, especially from data scientists who are new to R but proficient in multiple programming languages, is that R is “quirky” and annoying because there is almost always more than one way to do simple things. I usually counter that they are trying to say that ... [Read more...]

By Joseph Rickert In a recent blog post, David Smith reported on a talk that Steve Yun and I gave at STRATA in NYC about building and benchmarking Poisson GLM models on various platforms. The results presented showed that the rxGlm function from Revolution Analytics’ RevoScaleR package running on a ... [Read more...]

You've probably heard of the Birthday Paradox: it only takes a small gathering of people before it's quite likely that two of them share the same birthday. You can solve the problem analytically or with simulation, but usually in either case simplifying assumptions are made (no-one born on February 29, for ... [Read more...]

By Joseph Rickert Revolution’s resident economist, Saar Golde, is very fond of saying that “90% of what you might from a recommendation engine can be achieved with simple techniques”. To illustrate this point (without doing a lot of work), we downloaded the million row movie dataset from www.grouplens.org ... [Read more...]

By Joseph Rickert Even to the practiced eye, looking at coefficients in R model summaries can be tedious. And, capturing information about the significance of coefficients from scores or maybe even hundreds of models in a way that makes writing the final report a bit easier is a time consuming ... [Read more...]

By Joseph Rickert Yesterday, the cosmic randomizer placed me next to a newly minter lawyer in a crowed Los Gatos coffee shop. In three minutes of conversation I learned that that the fellow was interested in corporate law, was about to take a job that would give him a seat ... [Read more...]

By Joseph Rickert Put up a poster that says something like “Data Mining with R” anywhere in the Bay Area and you will surely draw a crowd. But it was still a bit of a surprise that the monthly meeting of the Bay Area R User’s group was so ... [Read more...]

By Joseph Rickert Anyone seeking to learn R faces two major challenges: (1) learning how to swim in the sea of information: R packages, books, websites, blog posts, message boards etc. that threatens to drown a newbie and (2) and coming to grips with the structure, syntax and features of the language ... [Read more...]