Tim Gasper (Product Manager at Big Data platform Infochimps) has an informative article at TechCrunch that provides an overview of five open-source technologies trending now for Big Data applications. They are: Storm and Kafka (for processing stream data) Drill and Dremel (for ad-hoc queries of big data) R (for data ... [Read more...]

Today's guest post is by Naomi Robbins, author of the Effective Graphs blog — ed. I write a blog on effective graphs for Forbes. David Smith invited me to write a guest post here that was a roundup of some of my Forbes posts where R was used. My use of ... [Read more...]

KDnuggets recently posted its annual poll on data mining software, and the R language retains its #1 ranking as the most commonly-used software for data mining: R is now used by 52.5% of poll respondents, compared with 45% last year. Donnie Berkholz provides an analysis of the year-on-year trends for Redmonk. He provides ... [Read more...]

The R language gets a brief mention in an article in yesterday's New York Times on automated bond trading: The traders here are mostly educated in math or physics, often outside the United States, and their desks are piled high with textbooks like the “R Graphs Cookbook,” for working with ... [Read more...]

CIO.com recently published its list of 9 open-source technologies to watch. Hadoop is first on the list, and second up is the R Project: R is an open source programming language and software environment designed for statistical computing and visualization. R was designed by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at ... [Read more...]

For the past 12 years, KDNuggets has conducted an annual poll asking "What analytics/data mining software you used in the past 12 months for a real project (not just evaluation)". In this year's poll, R was the top-ranked data mining solution, selected by 30.7% of poll respondents. Microsoft Excel was second, at 29.8%. ... [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 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...]

Information Age recently published a feature article devoted to the R language, "Putting the R in analytics". Says author Pete Swabey: Already popular in universities, there are signs that R is finding increasing adoption in the enterprise. This promises to lower the barriers of entry for advanced analytics, and may ... [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 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...]

Ed Chen is a data scientist at Twitter, so he's accustomed to working with big data and complex models. In an interview with MIT Technology Review, he describes his data science toolbox: A common pattern for me is that I'll code a MapReduce job in Scala, do some simple command-line ... [Read more...]

We can add SAP to the list of vendors offering R integration with their products. InformationWeek reports that the new SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analysis model provides a graphical user interface to R. Created in reaction to "competitive and market forces, including the momentum of open source R", the new module ... [Read more...]

Revolution Analytics' CEO Dave Rich was interviewed by Wikibon's David Vellante and SiliconAngle's John Furrier at the Strata 2012 conference last week. Given Dave's background at Accenture Analytics, the conversation naturally turned to impact of predictive analytics and R on business services. (See the video after the jump, below.) Bret Latmore ... [Read more...]

The past couple of years have seen a dramatic growth in the use of the R language in the enterprise. R has always been pervasive in academia for research and teaching in statistics and data science, and as new graduates trained in R have migrated to the workplace the demand ... [Read more...]

The Winter 2012 edition of Sybase's Financial Services Viewpoint newsletter includes two articles related to R. The "Industry Insight" article "R is Hot" (written by yours truly) is a one-page summary of the R phenomenon: what it is, how it's used, and how it's revolutionizing data analysis. The "Industry Insight" article ... [Read more...]

While we were out over the holiday break, Silicon Angle selected five open-source startups that are commercializing and contributing to open source projects as "Startups to Watch in 2012". Revolution Analytics was #2 on the list: This was a busy year for Revolution. The company released Revolution R 5.0, which included Hadoop integration, ... [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...]

Dan Woods at Forbes interviewed LinkedIn's Daniel Tunkelang about the rise of data science and on building data science teams. When asked how students today should prepare themselves to be data scientists, Tunkelang gives some good advice: When we built the data science team at LinkedIn a few years ago, ... [Read more...]