An interview with Revolution Analytics CEO Dave Rich was published this week by BeyeNetwork. During the interview, Dace was asked about how the statistical modeling platforms have changed over the decades: People have been doing statistical modeling and predictive analytics for 50 years now, SAS and SPSS have been around since ... [Read more...]

R user Diego Valle analyzed the rate of divorces in Mexican marriage since 1993 (the earliest date for which data are available) and found that not only have more marriages ended in divorce over time, but marriages that do end are ending sooner: This chart is a bit complicated, but it ... [Read more...]

Ever since I started using ggplot2 more often at work in order to do graphs, I’ve realized something about the use of colour in bar graphs vs. dot plots: When I’m looking at a graph displayed on the brilliant Viewsonic … Continue reading → [Read more...]

R user Arthur Charpentier attempts to use the raster library and R functions to find Waldo in a "Where's Waldo" image: Sadly, it turned out that Waldo was a bit too tricky to spot using these techniques. But Arthur did have more success identifying the US flag in a shot ... [Read more...]

Sameer Chopra, vice president of Advanced Analytics at Orbitz Worldwide, wrote recently in Analytics magazine about the changing landscape of processes, software and systems for statistical modelers. In a section on "Big Data and Open Source Analytics", Chopra lays out the reasons why the R language "has become the data-mining ... [Read more...]

Some people will say ‘you have to learn R if you want to get a job doing statistics/data science’. I say bullshit, you have to learn statistics and learn to work in a variety of languages if you want to … Continue reading → [Read more...]

by Yanchang Zhao, RDataMining.com This post presents an example of social network analysis with R using package igraph. The data to analyze is Twitter text data of @RDataMining used in the example of Text Mining, and it can be downloaded … Continue reading → [Read more...]

As part of an on-going paper with Kerrie Mengersen and Pierre Pudlo, we are using a GARCH(1,1) model as a target. Thus, the model is of the form which is a somehow puzzling object: the latent (variance) part is deterministic and can be reconstructed exactly given the series and the ... [Read more...]

I have to admit, first, that finding Waldo has been a difficult task. And I did not succeed. Neither could I correctly spot his shirt (because actually, it was what I was looking for). You know, that red-and-white striped shirt. I guess it sho... [Read more...]

The most recent edition of the Revolution Newsletter is out. The news section is below, and you can read the full May edition (with highlights from this blog and community events) online. You can subscribe to the Revolution Newsletter to get it monthly via email. New R Training Courses Announced. ... [Read more...]

Based on an analysis of Google Scholar data on usage of statistical software, Bob Muenchen makes a forecast: R will overtake SAS and SPSS in 2015. Forecasting is extrapolation — always a tricky business — so Bob also provides these qualitative reasons why R will continue to grow at the expense of SAS ... [Read more...]

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Learning to use a data analysis tool well takes significant effort, so people tend to continue using the tool they learned in college for much of their careers. As a result, the software used by professors and their students is … Continue reading → [Read more...]

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The main reason why I have usually chosen to use excel to make my plots at work is because I had difficulty feeding the summary stats in R into a plotting function.  One thing I learned this week is how … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Things have been going wild since I opened this blog. Tasks were piled up while I was tight on time. At present, I’m facing a major challenge in my life. However, I decide to spare some time for self-improvements. R … Continue reading → [Read more...]

A very useful way of keeping up with blogs in a particular area is to subscribe to a blog aggregator. These will syndicate posts from a large number of blogs and provide links back to the original sources. So you only need to subscribe once to get all the good ... [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...]

Looking to learn R, or to expand your R skills for data visualization or package development? Here are some R courses presented by the experts you may be interested in: June 19-20: Visualization in R with ggplot2. This course presented by Garrett Grolemund & Dr. Winston Chang of Rice University is ... [Read more...]

A recent arXiv posting of the paper “On the Generalized Ratio of Uniforms as a Combination of Transformed Rejection and Extended Inverse of Density Sampling” by Martino, Luengo, and Míguez from Madrid rekindled my interest in this rather peculiar simulation method. The ratio of uniforms samples uniformly on the ... [Read more...]