If you'd like to learn more about using the PMML package in R to export statistical models, or if you'd just like to learn more about building predictive models in Revolution R and creating predictions (scores) from them in other applications or in the cloud, I'll be co-presenter on a ... [Read more...]

The recently announced Revolution Analytics / Zementis partnership goes a long way towards demonstrating how R fits into big-league production environments. A frequent complaint against R is that although R is fine prototyping tool it is not able to handle production environments. Well, that’s just not true. In fact, it ... [Read more...]

Heritage Health and Kaggle have teamed up to create the biggest data science competition thus far: the Heritage Health Prize, which challenges competitors to build a statistical model to predict the number of days a person is likely to spend in hospital over the next year, based on (anonymized) factors ... [Read more...]

This post is contributed by Revolution Analytics CEO Norman Nie, and cross-posted from the Future of Open Source Forum. A lot of attention has been focused recently on Big Data, and rightly so: Big Data is a Big Deal. (See this LinuxInsider article, Big Data, Big Open Source Tools, for ... [Read more...]

The San Francisco Bay Area ACM runs several courses on data mining and machine learning with R. Machine Learning 101 deals primarily with supervised learning problems, and Machine Learning 102 covers unsupervised learning and fault detection. Machine Learning 101 & 102 were most recently presented by Mike Bowles & Tricia Hoffman in September, and the lecture ... [Read more...]

An the New York R User Group* last night, 100 R users heard Ni Wang and Max Lin talk explain how "R is one of the important tools used by analysts and engineers at Google for analyzing data". During the talk, Lin revealed that Google plans to make "R more integrated ... [Read more...]

Kaggle, the predictive-analytics competition site, has analyzed the preferences of the 2,500 data scientists who participate in its competitions, and R was the most-preferred software of the competitors at 22.5%. The next-nearest alternative was Matlab, at 16%. On a related note, the premier of the Australian state of New South Wales has just ... [Read more...]

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Peter Aldhous and Jim Giles -- from New Scientist's San Francisco bureau -- are looking for a statistician and R user to take part in an interesting data analysis challenge, and also be part of a future article in the magazine. They were inspired by this rather tongue-in-cheek presentation where ... [Read more...]

A quick reminder that the IEEE traffic-prediction competition closes soon. If you're thinking of entering you'll need to get the description of your R-based solution in by September 13. IEEE ICDM Contest: Road Traffic Prediction for Intelligent GPS Navigation [Read more...]

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TDWI (The Data Warehousing Institute) recently published a comprehensive article about R and increasing level of activity around it from commercial organizations, including Revolution Analytics. The article opens with: In statistical circles, "R" is the name of an open source programming language for statistical analysis. These days, it might also ... [Read more...]

Revolution CEO Norman Nie just recorded a live podcast with Terry Sweeney of Internet Evolution Radio. In the 30-minute interview, Norman talked about the history of R, his time with SPSS, development plans for Revolution R, and how predictive analytics is impacting businesses, the Web, and even political opinion. You ... [Read more...]

Here's an interesting competition that may well lend itself to R: the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining is running a contest to find the best way of predicting traffic problems. There are three separate contests: Predicting congestion: a series of measurements from 10 selected road segments is given and the ... [Read more...]

Data must be selected carefully.  The predictive usefulness of the model is grossly diminished if outliers taint the available data.  Figure 1, for instance, shows the Defense spending (as a fraction of the national budget) between 1948 and 1968. Note how the trend curve (as defined by our linear difference model from the ... [Read more...]

I really enjoyed all four talks at today's online conference, Making Data Work. (Disclosure: Revolution sponsored this conference.) I thought the four speakers together gave a great overview of issues related to the processing, analysis, and visualization of big data. Mike Driscoll started off with a useful categorization for data ... [Read more...]

Really pleased with how our webinar today, Supercharge BI and Dashboards with Predictive Analytics, turned out. Steve Miller from OpenBI gave a great introduction to the motivations and need for predictive analytics. Andrew Lampitt from Jaspersoft was next up, with an overview of the Jaspersoft system for BI reports and ... [Read more...]

If you haven't done so already, it's not too late to register for tomorrow's 1-hour webinar, Supercharge BI and Dashboards with Predictive Analytics. I'll be one of the presenters, talking about R and its applications for business intelligence. The topics and speakers will be: Introduction: Analytics and BI (Steve Miller, ... [Read more...]

Steve Miller at the InformationManagement blog has been looking at predictive analytics tools for business intelligence applications, and naturally turns to the statistical modeling and prediction capabilities of R. Says Steve: The R Project for Statistical Computing continues to dazzle in the open source world, with exciting new leadership at ... [Read more...]