Publications by David Smith
Slides from High-Performance Analytics webinar now available
Thanks to everyone who attended the webinar I presented this morning, High-Performance Analytics with REvolution R and Windows HPC Server. My slides are now available for download at the link below; even if you’re not using Windows, I hope the slides are a useful introduction to the foreach parallel programming construct in general. If you do u...
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Saving the world with R
Tuesday’s meeting of the Bay Area R UseR Group at the LinkedIn offices was a great event. The headline speaker was Joe Adler, author of the excellent R reference manual, R in a Nutshell. Joe’s presentation was an in-depth look at the relative speed of various options in R for looking up values from a key in a key-value pair sequence. One of t...
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Because it’s Friday: When infographics go bad
Phil Gyford laments crappy infographics swamping the good: Phil Gyford on Flickr: Infographic (used under Creative Commons license) Related To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: Revolutions. R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials about learning R and many other t...
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R and the Next Big Thing
I’ve been travelling for the past few days (for the R/Finance 2010 conference in Chicago), so I’d missed much of the reaction to AnnMaria De Mars’ article last week where she claimed that “R is an epic fail”. Understandably, that inflammatory statement provoked many reactions from the R community on Twitter and in the blogosphere. (I s...
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Data I/O performance tips
The R tag on StackOverflow recently topped 1000 questions, and continues to be a great community resource for practical tips on using the R language for data analysis and visualization. To take one example, “Efficiency of operations on R data structures” has been answered with some great tips on efficiently getting data in and out of the R sy...
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Why use R? Because that’s what the pros use
I had the great pleasure of sitting down for a beer with Steve O’Grady (from the open-source analyst group RedMonk), at the MySQL conference last week. It was great to get the perspective of someone who knows the tech industry so well, sees predictive analytics as a hot area, and is taking an active interest in statistics and R (Steve has been ...
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R 2.11.0 released
The latest version of R from the R Project, R 2.11.0, is now available in source code form. Binaries for Windows, Mac and Linux will appear in your local CRAN mirror in the next few days. Some new features include: Support for rendering bitmap images in graphics devices, via a new function rasterImage() The new function vapply is like apply, but ...
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New R User Group in San Diego
There’s a new local R User Group in San Diego (CA, USA), and they’re meeting tonight. If you’re in the area, why not RSVP and come along? The topic looks great:Our speaker, Scott Wallihan, will be covering how to expand R’s functionality through custom packages. This topic will be covered over two meetings. In our April meeting, we will c...
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R/Finance 2010 … and unicorns
At the Information Management blogs, Steve Miller has posted a great roundup of last weekend’s R/Finance 2010 conference in Chicago. Here’s Steve’s overall take:This year’s conference was even better than the 2009 inaugural, the in-excess-of-200 participants consumed by more than 20 consecutive high-powered presentations over the fast-pac...
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Because it’s Friday: Four chords, and the truth
This one’s for the musicians out there. (By the way, in my purely anecdotal experience, musical aptitude appears to have a higher-then-expected representation amongst stats folks. I however am the exception that proves the rule, as anyone who’s suffered through my Rock Band vocals can attest. But I digress.) What do the chords C#m...
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