Publications by David Smith
Accidental aRt
R is a very powerful language for creating custom data visualizations, but during the development process sometimes you make a mistake and things go horribly wrong. But sometime serendipity intervenes, and the (unintended) result can be quite beautiful. Accidental aRt, if you will. Curated by Kara Woo and Erika Mudrak, this fantastic Tumblr captu...
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Webinar recording: Applications in R
Many thanks to everyone who attended Tuesday's webinar, Applications in R – Success and Lessons Learned from the Marketplace. We had a great turnout and a very lively Q&A session. I've already shared many of the slides describing how companies like Google, Facebook and the New York Times use R, but this is the first time the presentation has be...
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Statisticians get the PR treatment
I'm here at the JSM conference in Boston, the latest annual gathering of 6000+ statisticians from North America and around the world. (Revolution Analytics is a proud sponsor of the conference.) One of the great things to see is that the American Statistical Association, the organizer of the conference and the professional body for statisticians,...
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In case you missed it: July 2014 Roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from June of particular interest to R users: The deadline for our contest to visualize the location of R user groups has been extended to August 16. Previews of R-related sessions at this year's JSM conference in Boston. Coding errors in R graphics scripts serendipitously create some interestin...
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The Open Source R Programming Language is Becoming Pervasive
So says CIO.com, in a recent article 11 Market Trends in Advanced Analytics. R, an open source programming language for computational statistics, visualization and data is becoming a ubiquitous tool in advanced analytics offerings. Kirsch says nearly every top vendor of advanced analytics has integrated R into their offering and so that they can...
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John Chambers: Interfaces, Efficiency and Big Data
Joe wrote about this already, but now the recording of John Chambers' keynote presentation from the useR! 2014 conference, Interfaces, Efficiency and Big Data, is now available for viewing thanks to Data Science LA. In the video, John dives into the history of the S language for which he won the ACM Software Systems award and which ultimately led...
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Table comparing the statistical capabilities of software packages
A statistical consultant known only as “Stanford PhD” has put together a table comparing the statistical capabilities of the software packages R, Matlab, SAS, Stata and SPSS. For each of 57 methods (including techniques like “ridge regression”, “survival analysis”, “optimization”) the author ranks the capabilities of each software...
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Search for CRAN, GitHub and BioConductor packages at Rdocumentation.org
If you're looking for just the right package to solve your R problem, you could always browse through the list of available packages on CRAN. But with almost 6000 entries, that's not going to be the most efficient process. And even then, many very useful packages aren't found on CRAN: there are more than 800 packages hosted on BioConductor and mo...
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Data Cleaning is a critical part of the Data Science process
A New York Times article yesterday discovers the 80-20 rule: that 80% of a typical data science project is sourcing cleaning and preparing the data, while the remaining 20% is actual data analysis. The article gives short shrift to this important task by calling it “janitorial work”, but whether you call it data munging, data wrangling or an...
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How to integrate R with your calendar
Hilary Parker has contributed a lovely article to Significance, the magazine of the American Statistical Association and the Royal Statistical Society, on using R to set your Google calendar to mark the time of sunsets. Hilary details the process in the article, but the basic idea is to use the sunrise.set function from the StreamMetabolism packa...
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