By Joseph Rickert Even to the practiced eye, looking at coefficients in R model summaries can be tedious. And, capturing information about the significance of coefficients from scores or maybe even hundreds of models in a way that makes writing the final report a bit easier is a time consuming ... [Read more...]

Revolution Analytics CEO Norman Nie sat down with Cassimir Medford from Business Agility to talk about the problems business today face with respect to Big Data. The two big problems identified: finding adequately trained personnel and locating the right tools. Norman traces the problem of finding skilled practitioners to work ... [Read more...]

By Joseph Rickert Put up a poster that says something like “Data Mining with R” anywhere in the Bay Area and you will surely draw a crowd. But it was still a bit of a surprise that the monthly meeting of the Bay Area R User’s group was so ... [Read more...]

EMC last week published the results of a survey of 462 IT decision makers who self-identified as either a data scientist or business intelligence professional (plus 35 invitees who were attendees at the EMC Data Scientist Summity and/or Kaggle competitors). There's a nice summary of the conclusions at the EMC blog, (... [Read more...]

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

The open-source RHadoop project to integrate R and Hadoop continues apace, with a new version of the rmr package released this week. Changes in this version improve performance when storing and retrieving R objects from Hadoop with a native serialization process, support for equijoins (a MapReduce-style merge) and some new ... [Read more...]

Dan Woods at Forbes makes a salient point about Big Data: it's not good enough merely to spend a ton of money to collect and store data -- it needs to earn its keep via data analysis: Let’s say you buy a huge Hadoop cluster along with Revolution Analytics, ... [Read more...]

There's a new CRAN mirror available: cran.revolutionanalytics.com. It's provided by Revolution Analytics and hosted at Rackspace's high-availability data center in Dallas, TX. Especially for R users located in the western US, using this mirror will provide high-bandwidth access to open-source R downloads and CRAN packages while taking the ... [Read more...]

Now that the final submissions are in for the Applications of R in Business contest, it's time to announce the judging panel who will select the winners for $20,000 in cash prizes from Revolution Analytics. They are: Edd Dumbill, technologist and writer for O'Reilly Media David Menninger, VP & Research Director at ... [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...]

For those looking for more background behind the updates in Revolution R Enterprise 5.0, there are now a couple of interviews online where I talk about the new release. At IT Business Edge ("Revolution Analytics' Goal: Make R Analysis Enterprise-Friendly"), I had a chat with Loraine Lawson about how Revolution R ... [Read more...]

As reported on the Kaggle blog No Free Hunch, R remains the preferred tool for data scientists seeking to win the prizes in the predictive modeling competitions: More than 30% of Kaggle competitors report using R for their analysis, up from 22% a year ago. R's flexibility and the breadth of packages ... [Read more...]

At the DecisionStats blog, Ajay Ohri has published his review of Revolution R Enterprise 5.0. The review includes a slideshow highlighting some of the features of the new release, including the expanded code snippets manager and the new cluster job manager. It's well worth checking out if you'd like a quick ... [Read more...]

Revolution R Enterprise 5.0, which we announced last week, is now available for free download to students and faculty at academic institutions worldwide. If you've downloaded Revolution R Enterprise via the academic program before and are on the mailing list, you will have already received an email with download instructions; if ... [Read more...]

In yesterday's webinar, "New Features in Revolution R Enterprise 5.0 to Support Scalable Data Analysis", Sue Ranney demonstrated the features of the RevoScaleR big data analysis package included with Revolution R Enterprise. In the webinar, she showed how to use the rxImport function to import big data sets from SAS, SPSS ... [Read more...]

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

A reminder that Sue Ranney will be presenting the webinar New Features in Revolution R Enterprise 5.0 (Including RevoScaleR) to support Scalable Data Analysis tomorrow (Thursday) at 11AM Pacific time. To whet your appetite, here's another video demonstation of more of the new big data analysis features, including the rxDataStep function ... [Read more...]

We're proud to announce the latest update to the enhanced, commercial-grade distribution of R, Revolution R Enterprise 5.0. With each new release, Revolution R Enterprise adds more capabilities to open-source R, to make R users more productive, to improve performance of R programs, to support Big Data analytics, and to provide ... [Read more...]

Hadley Wickham, R guru and author of several popular R packages (ggplot2 and plyr, to name just two), will present his 2-day R Development Master Class in New York City, December 12-13. This two-day course offers expert instruction in R programming and package development, and is ideal for anyone looking ... [Read more...]

Revolution Analytics CTO David Champagne visited Hadoop World 2011 this week, and delivered a presentation on "The Powerful Marriage of R and Hadoop" to a standing-room-only crowd of R and Hadoop enthusiasts. I've included David's slides below: The talk also generated praise on Twitter, for example: David was also interviewed by ... [Read more...]