Publications by David Smith
More companies using R: Uber and CultureAmp
To follow on from this post, here are a couple more companies using R: Uber, the ride-share company, uses R for statistical analysis. According to econometric analysis of DUI incidents (driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs) in Seattle, the introduction of the Uber service corresponded with a 10% decrease in DUIs (about 5 a week). The ...
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Hollywood loves orange and blue
Ever since the days of digital film processing, cinematographers have had free rein to recolor their shots in any way they like, without the hassle of chemical developing systems from the old film days. The Coen Brothers' Oh Brother Where Art Thou was the first Hollywood film to use this process, giving the film a washed-out yellow hue reminisce...
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R popularity update
Earlier this month, the results of the 15th annual KDnuggets Software Poll were released and R's popularity continues to grow. 38.5% of respondents reporting using open source R in the last 12 months, up from 37.4% in 2013. R was second only to RapidMiner in popularity, which was used by 44.2% of respondents to this poll. You can see the top 5 ...
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Where World Cup players actually come from
To play in a World Cup national soccer team, a player must be a citizen of that country. But most World Cup players don't regularly play in the nation of their World Cup team. Some hold dual citizenship; others simply play for a league team in a foreign country where citizenship rules don't apply. In this elegant chart, Guy Abel, a statistici...
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An infographic comparing R, SAS and SPSS
The R online training site DataCamp has created an infographic comparing R, SAS and SPSS. Provocatively titled “Statistical Language Wars“, the infographic compares the history, purpose, ease of learning, popularity and marketability of skills in each of the three systems. Here's a small detail (click for the full chart): The chart also incl...
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Bank of America uses R for reporting
A recent FastCoLabs article, “The 9 Best Languages For Crunching Data“, starts its list with the R language: It would be downright negligent to start this list with any language other than R. It has been kicking around since 1997 as a free alternative to pricey statistical software, such as Matlab or SAS. But over the past few years, it’s ...
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Interactive, web-ready ggplot2-style graphics with ggvis
Hadley Wickham's been working on the next-generation update to ggplot2 for a while, and now it's available on CRAN. The ggvis package is completely new, and combines a chaining syntax reminiscent of dplyr with the grammar of graphics concepts of ggplot2. The resulting charts are web-ready in scalable SVG format, and can easily be made interacti...
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How data-driven companies use R to compete
The editors at DataInformed invited me to write an article about how R is used in business, and I was pleased to oblige. The article, How Companies use R to Compete in a Data-Driven World, is now live and describes how Facebook, The New York Times, X+1, ANZ Bank and many others successfully use R to analyze their data. You can also find addition...
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useR! 2014 is underway with 16 tutorials
The annual worldwide user conference useR! 2014 is underway at UCLA, beginning with a full day of tutorials. This year's useR! conference is a record-breaker with more than 700 attendees, so most of the tutorial sessions have been jam-packed. The tutorials cover a diverse array of R applications: data management, visualization, statistics and bi...
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Revolution Analytics: the R company since 2007
Revolution Analytics, founded in 2007, was the first company devoted to the R project. Since then, we've been behind several R initiatives, including the RHadoop project and the network of R user groups around the world. I gave this short presentation today at the useR! 2014 conference in Los Angeles with some of the highlights from Revolution An...
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