Publications by David Smith
Entering the field as a data scientist with certification
By Neera Talbert, VP Services and Ben Wiley, R Programmer at Revolution Analytics By now, everyone should be familiar with the data scientist boom. Simply logging onto LinkedIn reveals a seemingly infinite number of people with words and phrases like “Data Scientist”, “Big Data Specialist”, and “Analytics” in their title. A few we...
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Because it’s Friday: A 3-minute movie in 4095 bytes
This entire movie — images, music, everything — is generated from a Windows PC executable of just 4,095 bytes. That's not a typo: we're not talking bytes not megabytes or gigabytes here. Less than 4kb total creates this entire scene. For comparison, a medium-quality video file of this exact same scene in AVI format comes in at over 64Mb: ...
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DataScienceLA interviews David Smith
While I was in LA for the useR! 2014 conference last month, I had the great pleasure of being among the participants in the DataScienceLA interview series hosted by Eduardo Ariño de la Rubia. Eduardo is both an R user and an excellent interviewer: his preparation and knowledge of R has resuled in a fascinating interview series for any R user. ...
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R tops KDNuggets data analysis software poll for 4th consecutive year
KDNuggests asked its readers the question “What programming/statistics languages you used for an analytics / data mining / data science work in 2014?” and one again, R was the #1 response. (R was also the #1 response in similar polls in 2013, 2012 and 2011.) The top 5 selections of the 719 respondents were: R (352 respondents) SAS (262) Pyt...
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Hortonworks Seminar Series: The Modern Data Architecture
As more companies explore the benefits that Hadoop may provide, the opportunities to better understand the technology are myriad and unequal. As a provider of in-Hadoop analytics, Revolution Analytics is participating in the coming Hortonworks seminar series. We will be on site to discuss how to deploy R-based analytics within Hadoop clusters usi...
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In case you missed it: August 2014 Roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from August of particular interest to R users: R is the most popular software in the KDNuggets poll for the 4th year running. The frequency of R user group meetings continues to rise, and there are now 147 R user groups worldwide. A video interview with David Smith, Chief Community Officer at R...
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More presentations from useR! 2014
DataScience.LA has posted a great recap of the latest LA R meetup, which in turn was a recap of presentations from the useR! 2014 conference. Follow that link to review slides from the event, whith summaries of useR! 2014 related to R and Python; Finance; dplyr; R books; SalesForce and R AnalyticFlow. DataScience.LA has also posted more videos f...
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Google uses R to calculate ROI on advertising campaigns
Google has just released a new package for R: CausalImpact. Amongst many other things, this package allows Google to resolve the classical conundrum: how can we asses the impact of an intervention (for example, the effect of an advertising campaign on website clicks) when we can't know what would have happened if we hadn't run the campaign? For a...
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Using Reddit’s JSON API to analyze post popularity
Graduate student Clay McLeod decided to find out what makes a post on the social-sharing site Reddit popular. These are the questions he seeks to answer: What’s in a post? Reddit pulls in around 115 million unique visitors each month, amassing a staggering 5 billion page views per month. For a long time, I’ve wondered what factors draw pe...
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New members for R-core and R Foundation
The R Foundation for Statistical Computing, the Vienna-based non-profit organization that oversees the R Project, has just added several new “ordinary members“. (Ordinary members participate in R Foundation meetings and provide guidance to the project.) The new members are: Dirk Eddelbuettel, Torsten Hothorn, Marc Schwartz, Hadley Wickham, ...
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