Publications by David Smith
New versions of plyr, ggplot2 released
Hadley Wickham has announced that new versions of his popular grammar-of-graphics charting package ggplot2 and his general-purpose data reshaping tool plyr for R are now available. plyr boasts several new features, most notably a new join function which should simplify what can sometimes be a difficult process in R: merging two data sets. A sim...
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Ross Ihaka in Sunday Star Times
New Zealand’s Sunday Star Times last weekend featured a profile on Ross Ihaka, co-creator of R: The down-to-earth associate statistics professor and his fellow researcher Robert Gentleman are famous around the world for developing R programming – a “glorified calculator” that crunches data. R programming allows for statistical computing ...
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R/Finance 2010 presentations
The presentations from April’s successful R/Finance 2010 conference in Chicago are now available online. (Revolution Analytics is a proud sponsor of the conference.) There’s some amazing content here for anyone looking for the cutting-edge of financial engineering, with presentations from practitioners and researchers at institutions like Inv...
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Competition: Predicting traffic
Here’s an interesting competition that may well lend itself to R: the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining is running a contest to find the best way of predicting traffic problems. There are three separate contests: Predicting congestion: a series of measurements from 10 selected road segments is given and the goal is to make short-ter...
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Visualizing the census
Now that the 2010 survey is over, you might be wondering what we can learn from the data when the aggregated results are published. For a good guide to the kinds of questions you’ll be able to answer, take a look at StatJump, where you can see tables and charts of the results of the 2000 census: population data (e.g. the largest cities), socia...
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Charting the World Cup
Now that Spain has won the World Cup, it’s interesting to go back and look at some metrics from the matches and see if we can tease out what characteristics made for a winning Cup team this time around. Fortunately, the Guardian’s Data Blog has made a wealth of World Cup statistics available, with data on every player of every team (position,...
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Norman Nie on Internet Evolution radio
Revolution CEO Norman Nie just recorded a live podcast with Terry Sweeney of Internet Evolution Radio. In the 30-minute interview, Norman talked about the history of R, his time with SPSS, development plans for Revolution R, and how predictive analytics is impacting businesses, the Web, and even political opinion. You can hear the recorded interv...
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Revolution at useR! 2010
Revolution Analytics is a proud sponsor of this year’s annual R user conference, useR! 2010, and many members of the Revolution team will be there at Gaithersburg next week. We’ll be hosting a booth at the conference where you can come up and meet the team, and see some of the new features being developed for Revolution R in action. Several m...
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R: a “Rock Star” for Business Intelligence
TDWI (The Data Warehousing Institute) recently published a comprehensive article about R and increasing level of activity around it from commercial organizations, including Revolution Analytics. The article opens with:In statistical circles, “R” is the name of an open source programming language for statistical analysis. These days, it might...
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Wanted: Big-data beta testers
We’re nearing completion of the package of statistical tools for very large data sets that I gave an early preview of at R/Finance 2010. It will be released for Revolution R Enterprise later this year, but we’re looking for some R users with big data sets to put the 1.0 version through its paces in the beta program and offer suggestions for s...
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