Publications by David Smith
Big Data Analytics predictions for 2014
As we close out the year, we asked a few members of the Revolution Analytics team to make a few predictions about big data analytics, data science and R for 2014. Here's what they came up with (including a few from yours truly). Michele Chambers, Chief Strategy Officer and VP Product Management While the sexiest job in 2013 was the data scientis...
3012 sym
Happy New Year!
It's a brand new year, and the Revolutions blog is now three weeks into its sixth year. Hard to believe that a little over five years ago this was the only R-related blog; now there are more than 450 and the R project and the R community continue to thrive and grow. To bring in the new year, I thought I'd take a look back at the 10 most popula...
2181 sym
The Fourier Transform, explained in one sentence
If, like me, you struggled to understand the Fourier Transformation when you first learned about it, this succinct one-sentence colour-coded explanation from Stuart Riffle probably comes several years too late: Stuart provides a more detailed explanation here. This is the formula for the Discrete Formula Transform, which converts sampled signals...
2058 sym 4 img
Guest Blogger Recap
We had a marvellous series of guest posts here on the blog over the past few weeks. I'd like to give a special thanks to all of our guest bloggers for contributing, with special thanks to Joe Rickert for stepping in as our acting editor for the past 3 weeks. If you were celebrating or vacationing over the holidays, here's what you missed: Ann Ca...
2795 sym
Where the whisky flavor profile data came from
Our crack-shot R trainer Luba Gloukhov generated a spirited (pun intended!) discussion from her post K-means Clustering 86 Single Malt Scotch Whiskies, with mentions of her analysis at FlowingData and Reddit amongst others. Other bloggers took a look at the data too, notably Christopher Ingraham who created this beautiful infographic of the fla...
1983 sym 2 img
In data scientist survey, R is the most-used tool (other than databases)
O'Reilly has just published the results of the Data Scientist Salary Survey, based on data collected from attendees of the O'Reilly Strata conferences in 2012 and 2013. There were some interesting results from the salary portion of the survey: data scientists at early-stage startups earned a median salary of US$130,000 data scientists at public ...
2353 sym 2 img
In case you missed it: December 2013 Roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from December of particular interest to R users: A ComputerWorld tutorial on basic data processing with R. Prediction: R will replace legacy SAS solutions and go mainstream. A chart of the growth of R user groups and local R meetings. I discussed R, data science and big data in an interview with t...
2183 sym
Easy data maps with R: the choroplethr package
Choropleth maps are a popular way of representing spatial or geographic data, where a statistic of interest (say, income, voting results or crime rate) are color-coded by region. R includes all of the necessary tools for creating choropleth maps, but Trulia's Ari Lamstein has made the process even easier with the new choroplethr package now avail...
1586 sym 2 img
Fast and easy data munging, with dplyr
RStudio's Hadley Wickham has just introduced a new package for filtering, selecting, restructuring and aggregating tabular data in R: the dplyr package. It's similar in concept to Hadley's original plyr package from 2009, but with several key improvements: It works exclusively with data in R data frames; It can process data in remote databases ...
2077 sym R (335 sym/3 pcs)
Demo this Wednesday: Drag-and-drop to create R-based workflows
Want to see how you can use a drag-and-drop user interface to run and share R code? Check out our webinar next Wednesday January 29 (hosted by Alteryx and Revolution Analytics): Creating Value That Scales with Revolution Analytics & Alteryx. In the webinar, Dan Putler (Alteryx's Data Artisan in Residence) will demonstrate the Alteryx drag-a...
1756 sym 2 img