We're definitely in the age of Big Data: today, there are many more sources of data readily available to us to analyze than there were even a couple of years ago. But what about extracting useful information from novel data streams that are often noisy and minutely transactional ... aye, there's ... [Read more...]

Earlier this week, Revolution Analytics' Joe Rickert gave a webinar Introduction to R for Data Mining. You can watch the replay below: If you're already familiar with R and the basics of data mining, you might want to skip ahead to the 13-minute mark where Joe's live demo begins. There ... [Read more...]

You've probably heard of the Birthday Paradox: it only takes a small gathering of people before it's quite likely that two of them share the same birthday. You can solve the problem analytically or with simulation, but usually in either case simplifying assumptions are made (no-one born on February 29, for ... [Read more...]

Revolution Analytics is proud to announce the latest update to our enhanced, production-grade distribution of R, Revolution R Enterprise. This update expands the range of supported computation platforms, adds new Big Data predictive models, and updates to the latest stable release of open source R (2.14.2), which improves performance of the ... [Read more...]

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...]

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...]

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...]

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...]

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...]

The story about the great work that SUNY Buffalo has been doing to find a cure for Multiple Sclerosis with Revolution R Enterprise and IBM Netezza has generated a lot of attention, with stories in Forbes, InformationWeek and eWeek (amongst others). To continue the discussion, IBM has put together a ... [Read more...]

Douglas Merrill, former CIO/VP of Engineering at Google, writes in Forbes about using the R language for data analysis: Most folks with math-oriented graduate degrees will have written something in R, a non-commercial option for your big data analysis. So, great graduates from great graduate schools know great tools. ... [Read more...]

Github has made data on its code repositories, developer updates, forks etc. from the public GitHub timeline available for analysis, and is offering prizes for the most interesting visualization of the data. Sounds like a great challenge for R programmers! The R language is currently the 26th most popular on ... [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...]

The most recent edition of the Revolution Newsletter is out. The news section is below, and you can read the full April edition (with highlights from this blog and community events) online. You can subscribe to the Revolution Newsletter to get it monthly via email. Spring Webinar Series. Our Spring ... [Read more...]

By Joseph Rickert Revolution’s resident economist, Saar Golde, is very fond of saying that “90% of what you might from a recommendation engine can be achieved with simple techniques”. To illustrate this point (without doing a lot of work), we downloaded the million row movie dataset from www.grouplens.org ... [Read more...]

In the 2012 edition of the SAP Sybase Capital Markets Guide, Revolution Analytics' Senior Advisor for Products and Strategy (and former CEO) Norman Nie writes about the "Five Benefits of Big Analytics". (You can also read his article at Enterprise Innovation.) Norman makes the argument that while sampling and aggregation are ... [Read more...]

The webinar team at Revolution Analytics has put together a great program over the next couple of months. With a mix of guest speakers and Revolution Analytics staff, this series will cover topics as diverse as Big Data with R and Hadoop, integrating R with MS Office, spatial statistics with ... [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...]

The competition amongst database vendors to create the fastest, most powerful "data layer" — the hardware and software to provide storage for Big Data with high-performance data processing — is clearly heating up. The Netezza appliance has been so successful that IBM has been racing to keep up with demand. SAP is ... [Read more...]

Tomorrow (at 2PM Eastern on Thursday), the White House White House Office of Science and Technology Policy will host a 90-minute forum on Challenges and Opportunities in Big Data. You can watch the event live at the previous link, and see federal government science heads from OSTP, NSF, NIH, DoE, ... [Read more...]