Following the announcement of the US Government Big Data Initiative, I was asked to write a small article about applications of R in government. The article has just appeared in Government Security News (and I believe will appear in their daily newsletter tomorrow). In the article, I highlighted several R ... [Read more...]

In conjunction with Facebook's record-setting IPO last Thursday, the New York Times created an infographic to put the size of the offer in context with other recent IPOs. A detail of the graphic as it appeared in the print edition appears below: ChartsNThings gives a fascinating peek into the weeklong ... [Read more...]

As widely reported by CNN, the Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo, the sophistication of speeches by US politicians has declined in recent years, dropping from an 11th-grade level in 2005 to a 10th-grade level today. The reports are based on an analysis by the Sunlight Foundation, based on textual analysis of ... [Read more...]

We had a great Twitter conversation last Thursday on the use of big-data analytics, Revolution R Enterprise, and IBM Netezza in the search for a cure for MS. Many thanks to the other panelists: Murali Ramanathan (SUNY Buffalo), Tim Coetzee (National MS Society) and moderator Shawn Dolley (IBM) for fielding ... [Read more...]

Kevin Quealy, graphics editor at the New York Times, has published another fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how the Times creates data visualizations for print and online. In his latest post, he looks at how a visualization of the Yankee's Mariano Rivera performance compared to other Major League Baseball pitchers was ... [Read more...]

In yesterday's webinar, Revolution Analytics CTO David Champagne demonstrated how to integrate statistical graphics and analytic computations created using R software with a variety of third-party applications. In each case Revolution R Enterprise Server is running as a compute server to the client application, with R scripts launched on each ... [Read more...]

Foursquare, the mobile location-sharing app (of which I'm a big fan), has an excellent recommondation system. Based on your recent checkins, places your friends found popular, and even the time of day, Foursquare Explore will recommend a great place for a sushi lunch, or the best place to buy new ... [Read more...]

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a debilitating and complex disease with an unknown cause — and for which there is currently no cure. The SUNY Buffalo is home to one of the leading multiple sclerosis (MS) research centers in the world, and as reported in Healthcare IT News, the research team is ... [Read more...]

Thanks to the lower-than-usual snowfall over most of the US this past winter, there's low risk of major flooding as the snow melts this Spring (for the first time in four years!). Nonetheless, being able to forecast river flood events is of critical importance to local emergency managers, water & electric ... [Read more...]

The O'Reilly Radar blog has a lengthy and very interesting interview with the lead and deputy CIOs of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the new US government agency devoted to consumer protections in the financial markets. In that interview, they talk about the many open-source tools used in the agency (... [Read more...]

Marketing is one of the pioneering domains when it comes to applications of predictive analytics to Big Data. (For example, how Target used statistical modeling to predict demographic attribues of customers, like pregnancy, to target coupons.) To get such powerful insights into the hands of marketers, DC-area company LityxIQ provides ... [Read more...]

Ed Chen is a data scientist at Twitter, so he's accustomed to working with big data and complex models. In an interview with MIT Technology Review, he describes his data science toolbox: A common pattern for me is that I'll code a MapReduce job in Scala, do some simple command-line ... [Read more...]

I've recently become hooked on the TV series Downton Abbey. I'm not usually one for costume dramas, but the mix of fine acting, the intriguing social relationships, and the larger WW1-era story make for compelling viewing. (Also: Maggie Smith is a treasure.) Despite the widespread criticial acclaim, Downton has ... [Read more...]

Zack Abrahamson, the "data whiz" at political analysis site Politico, is apparently an R user. Politico's Feb 10 2012 chart of the day clearly uses the ggplot2 graphics package and (quoting Politico) looks into the disenchanted slice of the GOP that’s not engaged with its party’s primary. And that slice ... [Read more...]

Erik Sigur, Information Technologist for the Department of Statistics and Probability at Michigan State University, writes at ReadWriteWeb about using Revolution R Enterprise to provide high-performance computation in R to the researchers in his department: Our search for a more effective version of R ultimately brought us to a product ... [Read more...]

Page 7 of Facebook's 213-page S-1 filing for their record-breaking IPO includes the following chart, under the headline: "Our Mission: To make the world more open and connected". This chart was created using the R language and Hadoop by Facebook intern Paul Butler. (Thanks to the blog IOER Tools for first ... [Read more...]

Ventana Research analyst David Menninger was on the judging panel for the Applications of R in Business contest. In a post on the Ventana research blog, he offers his perspectives on the contest, noting that R, as a statistical package, includes many algorithms for predictive analytics, including regression, clustering, classification, ... [Read more...]

It's with great pleasure that the team at Revolution Analytics announces the winners of the inaugural "Applications of R in Business" contest: Grand Prize ($10,000): Shannon Terry and Ben Ogorek, Nationwide Insurance for 'A Direct Marketing In-flight Forecasting System' Runner Up Prize ($5,000): Jeffrey Breen, Atmosphere Research Group for 'Mining Twitter for ... [Read more...]

A few days ago, Romain François explained how to interface with the Facebook Graph API explorer with R. This was a low-level interface, giving the R programmer the ability to the raw data that Facebook can provide about your connections. Now, just four days later, the first application in ... [Read more...]

Last Saturday, the New York Times published a feature article on the wealthiest 1% of Americans. The on-line version of the article included interactive features like this interactive map showing where your household ranks in the country and in local regions. The print edition, however, included some different (and necessarily static) ... [Read more...]