by Joseph Rickert Last Friday and Saturday the NY R Conference briefly lit up Manhattan's Union Square neighborhood as the center of the R world. You may have caught some of the glow on twitter. Jared Lander, volunteers from the New York Open Statistical Programming Meetup along with the staff ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert The New York Times is quietly changing the practice of science journalism. The Tuesday April 21, 2015 article: Ebola Lying in Wait, reports on "A growing body of scientific clues - some ambiguous, other substantive" that the Ebola virus may have lain dormant in West African rain forest for ... [Read more...]

by Vidisha Vachharajani Freelance Statistical Consultant R showcases several useful clustering tools, but the one that seems particularly powerful is the marriage of hierarchical clustering with a visual display of its results in a heatmap. The term “heatmap” is often confusing, making most wonder – which is it? A "colorful visual ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert Tracking R user group meetings is a good way to stay informed about what's happening in the R world. On Tuesday the Bay Area useR Group (BARUG) met at AdRoll in San Francisco. It was a mini-conference with 6 talks: Bryan Galvin our host at AdRoll (many thanks ... [Read more...]

by Ben Ubah Founder, RPowerLabs No disregard to R's colleagues, R is pioneering the creation of online virtual electric power system laboratories via RPowerLABS. RPowerLABS is a project, with the vision of deploying online, a vast array of highly demanded power system simulations for teaching and research using R. It ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert A recent post by David Smith included a map that shows the locations of R user groups around the world. While is exhilarating to see how R user groups span the globe, the map does not give any idea about the size of the community at each ... [Read more...]

by Ari Lamstein Introduction Today I will walk through an analysis of San Francisco Zip Code Demographics using my new R package choroplethrZip. This package creates choropleth maps of US Zip Codes and connects to the US Census Bureau. A choropleth is a map that shows boundaries of regions (such ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert I have written a several posts about the Parallel External Memory Algorithms (PEMAs) in Revolution Analytics’ RevoScaleR package, most recently about rxBTrees(), but I haven’t said much about rxExec(). rxExec() is not itself a PEMA, but it can be used to write parallel algorithms. Pre-built PEMAs ... [Read more...]

by Sherri Rose Assistant Professor of Health Care Policy Harvard Medical School Targeted learning methods build machine-learning-based estimators of parameters defined as features of the probability distribution of the data, while also providing influence-curve or bootstrap-based confidence internals. The theory offers a general template for creating targeted maximum likelihood estimators ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert There have been well over a hundred books on R published within the last ten years. Most of these texts with titles like “Introduction Statistics with R” or “Time Series with R” offer the reader a way to jump right in and perform some concrete statistical analysis ... [Read more...]

by Herman Jopia What is Binning? Binning is the term used in scoring modeling for what is also known in Machine Learning as Discretization, the process of transforming a continuous characteristic into a finite number of intervals (the bins), which allows for a better understanding of its distribution and its ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert The gradient boosting machine as developed by Friedman, Hastie, Tibshirani and others, has become an extremely successful algorithm for dealing with both classification and regression problems and is now an essential feature of any machine learning toolbox. R’s gbm() function (gbm package) is a particularly well ... [Read more...]

by Gary R. Moser Director of Institutional Research and Planning The California Maritime Academy I recently contacted Joseph Rickert about inviting Vim guru Drew Niel (web: vimcasts.org, book: "Practical Vim: Edit Text at the Speed of Thought") to speak at the Bay Area R User Group group. Due to ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert What will you be doing at 26 minutes and 53 seconds past 9 this coming Saturday morning? I will probably be running simulations. I have become obsessed with an astounding result from number theory and have been trying to devise Monte Carlo simulations to get at it. The result, well ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert R user group activity is still on the rise. The following plot of the number of R user group meetings listed on Revolution Analytics' Community Calendar over the most recent 114 weeks shows a slight to upward trend along with a couple of annual cycles. Predictably, meetings trail ... [Read more...]

by Matt Sundquist co-founder of Plotly Domino's new R Notebook and Plotly's R API let you code, make interactive R and ggplot2 graphs, and collaborate entirely online. Here is the Notebook in action: Published R Notebook To execute this Notebook, or to build your own, head to Domino's Plotly Project. ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert Distcomp, a new R package available on GitHub from a group of Stanford researchers has the potential to significantly advance the practice of collaborative computing with large data sets distributed over separate sites that may be unwilling to explicitly share data. The fundamental idea is to be ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert For the past few years, the Strata + Hadoop World Conference in San Jose has kicked off my personal conference season. With its focus on Data Science, Strata always seems to present some interesting R related talks, and I am looking forward to the various events over the ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert In the last week of January, HP Labs in Palo Alto hosted a workshop on distributed computing in R that was organized by Indrajit Roy (Principal Researcher, HP) and Michael Lawrence (Genentech and R-core member). The goal was to bring together a small group of R developers ... [Read more...]

James Peruvankal Sr. Program Manager, Revolution Analytics Information about the technology business ecosystems is valuable to both established companies as well as startups. Fortunately CrunchBase - the world’s most comprehensive dataset of startup activity, captures quite a bit of such information. Founded in 2007 by Mike Arrington, CrunchBase began as ... [Read more...]