The important criterion for a graph is not simply how fast we can see a result; rather it is whether through the use of the graph we can see something that would have been harder to see otherwise or that could not have been seen at all. – William Cleveland, The ... [Read more...]

Vote Compass is an online "electoral literacy application, whose goal is to encourage engagement with and stimulate discussion around the policy platforms of Canada's political parties. In the lead-up to the 2011 Canadian election, Vote Compass collected the results of an on-line 10-minute survey from more than 2 million participants, and used ... [Read more...]

The revision period for the Applications of R in Business Contest is now at a close, and the competitors have finalized their entries for a chance at $20,000 in prizes from Revolution Analytics. We're now in the judging phase, where the finalists will be rated on applicability to business, innovation and ... [Read more...]

Thanks to everyone for participating in the "Applications of R in Business" contest. R users submitted more than 25 entries, describing how R is used in industries including life sciences, finance, manufacturing, sentiment analysis, and even sports. Some entries are just outlines for now (competitors have until November 30 to finalize their ... [Read more...]

A common approach to reducing risk associated with financial portfolios is diversification. A portfolio made of components that are all highly correlated with each other -- a portfolio composed solely of financial stocks, for example -- is risky, because if there's a wide-spread crisis that affects the banking sector, all ... [Read more...]

The deadline to enter the "Applications of R in Business" contest is just a week away. To qualify for $20,000 in prizes from Revolution Analytics, your entry must be submitted to inside-r.org by midnight PST on October 31. Note that this doesn't have to be your final submission: as long as ... [Read more...]

In the New York Times' "Bits" blog today, Quentin Hardy offers recollections on Big Data talks at the recent Web 2.0 Summit. He begins with a definition of Big Data: Big Data is really about ... the benefits we will gain by cleverly sifting through it to find and exploit new patterns ... [Read more...]

Revolution Analytics' Joe Rickert has a new post on inside-R.org, demonstrating how you can use R and the RevoScaleR package to extract time series data from time-stamped logs (in this case, the "US Domestic Flights From 1990 to 2009" dataset on Infochimps): Analyzing time series data of all sorts is a ... [Read more...]

Lloyd's is the world's leading specialist insurance market, and is often the first to insure new, unusual or complex risks. So it's no surprise that Lloyd's is one of the many companies that use R and its advanced capabilities for data analysis to help manage its insurance risks. At the ... [Read more...]

By showing off what R can do for businesses, you could share in $20,000 in prizes from Revolution Analytics. R is already used in many companies around the world, but many people who could benefit from using R still don't know what it is or how it could help them. That's ... [Read more...]

At last month's R user group meeting in Melbourne, the theme was "Experiences with using SAS and R in insurance and banking". There, Hong Ooi from ANZ (Australia and New Zealand Banking Group) gave a presentation on "Experiences with using R in credit risk". I didn't get to see the ... [Read more...]

At JSM 2011 today, three Google employees (amongst the more than 20 Google delegates there) gave a little insight into how statistical analysis with R yields better results for companies using Google's various advertising products. Bill Heavlin from Google kicked off the session with a talk about conditional regression models, a statistical ... [Read more...]

Earlier this month Thomas Dinsmore, solutions architect for IBM Netezza’s Advanced Analytics team, had a great blog post on why companies should embrace R as an analytics platform. He says: There are three main reasons R should be part of your enterprise analytics architecture: R has capabilities not available ... [Read more...]

Kickstarter, a social funding platform where individuals can chip in cash to get a worthy project going, just celebrated their 10,000th kickstarted project. Kickstart employee Fred Benenson recognized the achievement by visualizing the funding of music, design, art, game and many other kinds of projects using R and ggplot2. For ... [Read more...]

I'm really pleased that an article I wrote, "5 real-world uses of big data", has been published in the widely-read technology blog GigaOm. In the article, I review five examples of using data science techniques and R to make sense of some large real-world data sets: Drew Conway's analysis of the ... [Read more...]

We've noted before that with the RGoogleVis package, it's easy to make motion charts in R, and create a web-based interactive chart that reflects the synchronous movements of two or three variables over time. R user Jeffrey Breen has a great new blog post showing exactly how easy it is, ... [Read more...]

Marketo, a leading marketing automation company, relies on data analysis to implement the features in its hosted application that help companies get the most out of their marketing dollar. We've just published a case study about how Marketo uses Revolution R Enterprise and the R language to analyze the massive ... [Read more...]

Last weekend here in the states was the 4th of July long weekend, one of the busier air travel days of the year. As anyone who flies in the States knows, with air travel often comes frustration, and in this social media age many express their frustration on Twitter: The ... [Read more...]

SocialFlow's blog has a great case study today on how news from a single tweet -- in this case, speculation made an hour before the President's announcement that Osama bin Laden had been killed -- can propagate through social networks. At 10:24 p.m. EST on Sunday May 1, Keith Urbahn tweeted: "... [Read more...]

The New York Times introduced R to the world with a feature article in 2009, and has been using R for many years to support its pioneering presentation data analysis and visualization, under the direction of graphics editor Amanda Cox. Last week, the New York R User Group's featured speaker was ... [Read more...]