Publications by David Smith
John Chambers recounts the history of S and R
“R has had a revolutionary effect on the way statistics are communicated.” So says John Chambers: one of the members of the R-core team overseeing R; and co-inventor of the S language. In this interview with Trevor Hastie (his co-author on Statistical Models in S), John Chambers recounts his involvement in the birth of the S language in 1976...
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NYT’s 4th Down Bot gives the SuperBowl edge to the Broncos
Who will win the SuperBowl this Sunday: Seattle or Denver? As pundits around the country weigh in with their predictions, you might want to check out the analysis from the New York Times' 4th Down Bot, which compares the coaches' calls on fourth down plays with what historical statistics and a point-forecasting model indicate would have been the...
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Princeton’s guide to linear modeling and logistic regression with R
If you're new to the R language but keen to get started with linear modeling or logistic regression in the language, take a look at this “Introduction to R” PDF, by Princeton's Germán Rodríguez. (There's also a browsable HTML version.) In a crisp 35 pages it begins by taking you through the basics of R: simple objects, importing data, a...
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R is 15th of top programming languages in latest RedMonk ranking
Analyst firm RedMonk periodically publishes rankings of the Top 20 programming languages, as measured by activity on StackOverflow and number of repositories on GitHub. In their most recent ranking (January 2014), R is ranked #15 amongst all programming languages. An impressive ranking for a domain-specific language; the top 3 were the general-pu...
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In case you missed it: January 2014 roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from January of particular interest to R users: Princeton’s Germán Rodríguez has published a useful “Introduction to R” guide, with a focus on linear and logistic regression. The rxDForest function in the RevoScaleR package fits random forests of histogram-binning trees. A tutorial on us...
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Winter Olympic Medal Standings, presented by R
There's no shortage of web sites listing the current medal standings at Sochi, not least the official Winter Olympics Medal Tally. And here's the same tally, rendered with R: Click through to see a real-time version of the chart, created with RStudio's Shiny by Ramnath Vaidyanathan. (By the way, does anyone know if it's possible to embed a live ...
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R skills attract the highest salaries
Two recent salary surveys have shown that R language skills attract median salaries in excess of $110,000 in the United States. In the 2014 Dice Tech Salary Survey of over 17,000 technology professionals, the highest-paid IT skill was R programming. While big-data skills in general featured strongly in the top tier, having R at the top of the l...
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BitCoin profits with the Sushi-Burger Shuffle
The BitCoin cryptocurrency has been much in the news of late. What, you don't have BitCoins? (Don't worry, neither do I.) Unless you have a supercomputer in your back yard and a cheap source of power, it's no longer really feasible to mine them yourself. But if you want some, several online exhanges will let you buy BitCoins for real money. But b...
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Because it’s Valentine’s Day: Statistical Plushies
Looking for a sweet gift for your data-loving significant other? Then check out these statistical distribution plushies on Etsy: Availale in pink (log-Normal distribution), yellow (chi-square distribution), light green (Normal distribution), baby blue (T-distribution), and lilac (uniform distribution). They're cute, they're educational, last ...
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Sales forecasting and direct mail optimization with Revolution R Enterprise and Alteryx
If you missed our recent webinar Creating Value that Scales, you missed out on a live demonstration of the big-data analytics of Revolution R Enterprise embedded in the drag-and-drop visual workflow interface of Alteryx. If you want to see how a decision-maker can use the results of workflows created by data scientists, skip ahead to 25:45 to ...
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