In this post I am goIing to summarize some of the things that I learned at Strata Santa Clara 2013. For now, I will only discuss the conference sessions as I have a much longer post about the tutorial sessions that I am still working on and will post at a ... [Read more...]

During the past few decades that I have been in graduate school (no, not literally) I have boycotted JSM on the notion that “I am not a statistician.” Ok, I am a renegade statistician, a statistician by training. JSM 2012 was held in San Diego, CA, one of the best places ... [Read more...]

Whenever I tell people in my family that I study Statistics, one of the first questions I get from laypeople is “do you count cards?” A blank look comes over their face when I say “no.” Look, if I am at a casino, I am well aware that the odds ... [Read more...]

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I have been waiting for the KDD conference to come to California, and I was ecstatic to see it held in San Diego this year. AdMeld did an awesome job displaying KDD ads on the sites that I visit, sometimes multiple times per page. That’s good targeting! Mining and ... [Read more...]

Some time over the past 6 weeks I randomly saw a tweet announcing the “Data Scientist Summit” and shortly below it I saw that it would be held in Las Vegas at the Venetian. Being a Data Scientist myself is reason enough to not pass up this opportunity, but Vegas definitely ... [Read more...]

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a service provided a Amazon Web Services that allows users to leverage computing power without the need to build and maintain servers, or spend money on special hardware. The idea is simple, the user “boots” up one or more machines and then accesses those machines ... [Read more...]

This week it was revealed that the iPhone stores users’ locations, and this immediately caused a huge firestorm of commentary by tech geeks, panic among privacy advocates, and delight to data geeks like myself. Even better/worse, it seems that the iPhone caches location traces long-term, possibly back to the ... [Read more...]

As most readers are probably aware, the free IDE for R, called RStudio, was recently released for general use and it immediately made huge waves within the R community. IDE stands for Integrated Development Environment. IDEs typically provides a rich set tools developing in some target language. For standard programming ... [Read more...]

I am happy to report that ByteMining is listed on “40 Fascinating Blogs for the Ultimate Statistics Geek“! Some of the ones that I frequently read, or are written by Twitter friends/followers (in no particular order): R-bloggers, an aggregate site containing blog posts tagged as posts about R. High quality ... [Read more...]

My first time at ACM Data Mining Camp was so awesome, that I was thrilled the make the trip up to San Jose for the November 2010 version. In July, I gave a talk at the Emerging Technologies for Online Learning Symposium conference with a faculty member in the Department of ... [Read more...]

As I am working on my dissertation and piecing together a mess of notes, code and output, I am wondering to myself “how long is this thing supposed to be?” I am definitely not into this to win the prize for longest dissertation. I just want to say my piece, ... [Read more...]

For Part I, Parallelism in R, click here. Tuesday night I again had the opportunity to present on high performance computing in R, at the Los Angeles R Users’ Group. This was the second part of a two part series called “Taking R to the Limit: High Performance Computing in ... [Read more...]

As a true R fan, I like to believe that R can do anything, no matter how big, how small or how complicated: there is some way to do it in R. I decided to approach my large, sparse matrix problem with this attitude. But here I sit a broken ... [Read more...]

This quarter I am TAing UCLA’s Statistics 102C. Introduction to Monte Carlo Methods for Professor Qing Zhou. This course did not exist when I was an undergraduate, and I think it is pretty rare to teach Monte Carlo (minus the bootstrap if you count that) or MCMC to undergrads. ... [Read more...]

My parents and I made plans to visit San Jose and Saratoga on my grandmother’s birthday, March 19, since that is where she grew up. I randomly saw someone tweet about the ACM Data Mining Camp unconference that happened to be the next day, March 20, only a couple of miles ... [Read more...]

It’s nice to be back after a pretty crazy two weeks or so. Let me start off by stating that this blog post is simply me pondering and may not be correct. Feel free to comment on inaccuracies or improvements! In preparation for an exam and my natural tendencies ... [Read more...]

I wrote this script for the UCLA Statistical Consulting Center. I don’t know all of the specifics, but one of our faculty members has this idea that we can help our paper, The Daily Bruin, with their graphics or something to that effect. I don’t quite understand because ... [Read more...]

Each quarter the UCLA Statistical Consulting Center hosts minicourses twice per week in R and LaTeX. Tonight was my turn to present. I presented Advanced Graphics in R. This was the same presentation I gave at the LA R Users’ Group in August will a fellow consultant. She and I ... [Read more...]