Publications by David Smith
Open Source is Opening Data to Predictive Analytics
This article by REvolution Computing CEO Norman Nie is crossposted from the Future of Open Source Forum.The R Project: despite there being over 2 million users of this open-source language for statistical data analysis, you might not have heard of it … yet. You might have seen this feature in the New York Times last year, and you might have hea...
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Clustering the world’s diets
Cluster Analysis is a useful technique for classifying the members of a group (people, events, measurements, etc) into “similar” groups. How “similar” is defined depends on the application, but generally involves looking at a number of attributes of the group. For example, we could cluster people by looking at their skin color, hair type,...
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Clinical Reporting with R
One of the main goals of analyzing clinical data is to produce a report. (What, you thought it was to make the world a better place?) The R Project has, of course, all the tools you need to perform the statistical analysis, calculate the tables of results, and present conclusions graphically. But how can you assemble all of that into a report th...
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Because it’s Friday: 3d Mandelbrot
To while away your Friday afternoon, why not explore the nooks and crannies of a 3-D version of the Mandelbrot set: And here’s how to create your own 2-D Mandelbrot set in R. Related To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: Revolutions. R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and t...
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Package Update Roundup: Feb 2010
This is a list of new or updated packages that were released for R in February, as announced on the r-packages mailing list. To include other updates on this list, please email David Smith. For a complete list of all updates on CRAN, see the CRANberries archive for February 2010. Follow package name links for ratings and other information on...
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R workshops in Vancouver
Isabella Ghement of the Ghement Statistical Consulting Company is presenting two R workshops in Vancouver, British Columbia:“An Introduction to the Statistical Software Package R” (April 15-16,2010; 8:30am-4:30pm; BCIT; Vancouver)“Advanced Statistical Modeling Using the Statistical Software Package R” (May 20-21, 2010; 8:30am-4:30pm; BCI...
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Visualizing droughts with R
Physicist and weather scientist Joe Wheatley used R to design and create a useful visual representation of how drought affects a region over long time-scales. Instead of charting absolute rainfall (or lack thereof), he instead charts the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), where extreme values (above 2 or below -2) indicate extreme wetness o...
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Nutritional supplements, ranked
One of my favourite shows on TV right now is The Big Bang Theory. For those who haven’t seen it: it’s like Friends, except instead of New York yuppies, it’s PhD physicists and engineers at CalTech. It’s nice to see geeks and smart people be the focus (rather than the comic relief) of a sitcom. Also, the equations on the ubiquitous whitebo...
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OSBC blogging
I’m at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco today and tomorrow; I’ll report in with updates after the talks. I’m particularly looking forward to the panel discussion on The Shifting Open Source Opportunity moderated by Ashlee Vance, the New York Times reporter who wrote the major story on R last year. (Interesting aside: I...
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O’Reilly at OSBC: The future’s in the data
Tim O’Reilly’s keynote talk at OSBC this evening was thought-provoking to say the least. The title of the talk was “The Real Open Source Opportunity”, and the surprise for me was that he wasn’t talking about Open Source software. Tim’s insight, and it’s a profound one, is that the next frontier for freedom and openness — and indee...
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