Publications by David Smith
Reflections on useR! 2014
UseR! 2014, the R user conference held last week in LA, was the most successful yet. Around 700 R users from around the world converged on the UCLA campus to share their experiences with the R language and to socialize with other data scientists, statisticians and others using R. The week began with a series of 3-hour tutorials on topics as diver...
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In case you missed it: June 2014 Roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from June of particular interest to R users: The useR! 2014 conference in Los Angeles opened with 16 tutorials. DataInformed published an article by David Smith on how various companies use R. Joe Rickert reviews the new book “Applied Predictive Modeling” by Max Kuhn and Kjell Johnson, wh...
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R 3.1.1 is released
As announced by Peter Dalgaard for the R Core Team today, R 3.1.1 has been released. Codenamed “Sock it to Me”, this is a patch release for R 3.1, and mostly includes minor bug fixes. It also includes some small improvements, including easier access to package help files, improved accuracy when importing data with very large integers, and so...
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IEEE ranks R #9 amongst all languages
IEEE — the world's largest professional association for the language of technology — recently published its ranking of the popularity of programming languages. The R language comes in at number 9 in the list. The ranking is based on 12 weighted factors, including Google search rankings and trends, social media chatter, aggregator posts (Redd...
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Guide to Machine Learning with R from InsideBigData
InsideBigData has published a new Guide to Machine Learning, in collaboration with Revolution Analytics. As the name suggests, the Guide provides an overview of machine learning techniques, with a focus on implementation with the R language and (for big-data applications) Revolution R Enterprise. You can download the Guide here (email registrati...
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July 22: Applications in R Webinar
Just a quick heads-up that I'll be presenting with Neera Talbert (VP Professional Services, Revolution Analytics) in a free webinar on Tuesday, July 22 on Applications in R: Success and Lessons Learned from the Marketplace. I'll describe several R applications from well-known companies (some of which can be seen in the presentation I gave at the ...
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There’s no mistake in the barley data
Statistics has many canonical data sets. For classification statistics, we have the Fisher's iris data. For Big Data statistics, the canonical data set used in many examples is the Airlines data. And for dotplots, we have the barley data, first popularized by Bill Cleveland in the landmark 1993 text Visualizing Data. Cleveland's innovations in da...
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magrittr: Simplifying R code with pipes
R is a functional language, which means that your code often contains a lot of ( parentheses ). And complex code often means nesting those parentheses together, which make code hard to read and understand. But there's a very handy R package — magrittr, by Stefan Milton Bache — which lets you transform nested function calls into a simple pipe...
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Learning from alternative R engines at DSC 2014
I was honoured to be invited earlier this month to the Directions of Statistical Computing meeting in Brixen, Italy. DSC is one of two meetings run by the R Project and unlike the useR! conference, DSC is a much smaller and intimate meeting (DSC 2014 had about 30 participants). If you haven't come across DSC meeting before (quite possible, given...
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Reuters uses R to report on surge in coastal flooding in US
As global warming causes sea levels to rise, the risk of flooding for coastal settlements also rises over time. A recent analysis by Reuters find that incidents of coastal flooding along the Eastern seaboard of the United States have surged in recent years as the sea level steadily rises. Flood levels have been exceeded in six eastern cities by ...
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