Publications by David Smith
How extreme is the Russian heatwave?
The devastating heatwave in Russia now seems to be over, but not before killing thousands, causing extensive wildfires, and destroying crops. But how severe was this heatwave, compared to past summers? Physicist and climate scientist Joe Wheatley looks at the record of temperature and rainfall in Russia over the last 60 years and places the last ...
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Traffic prediction contest closing soon
A quick reminder that the IEEE traffic-prediction competition closes soon. If you’re thinking of entering you’ll need to get the description of your R-based solution in by September 13. IEEE ICDM Contest: Road Traffic Prediction for Intelligent GPS Navigation Related To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment o...
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Taking R to the Limit: Parallelism and Big Data
In a two-part series at the Los Angeles R User Group[*], Ryan Rosario took a look at the many ways you can take the R language to the limits of high-performance computing. In Part I (see video at this link; slides and code also available), Ryan focuses on the various methods of parallel computing in R. There’s some great material here on ex...
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What’s for lunch? Private browsing.
Over at the Mozilla Metrics blog, Mozillan Hamilton Ulmer uses R and ggplot2 to look at when people (or at least, Firefox users that volunteered to share their usage data) enable private browsing. Turns out it isn’t just “porn mode” after all: the main use turns out to be lunchtime browsing away from the employer’s prying eyes: Follow th...
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Webinar: Big Data Analysis with Revolution R
Don’t forget that I’ll be hosting a webinar tomorrow talking about the new RevoScaleR package included with the forthcoming Revolution R Enterprise 4.0. The webinar will also feature a live demonstration from Joseph Rickert. The full details are below, and you can register for the webinar here. Big Data Analysis for R Using Revolution R Ente...
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R and Analytics: A good career choice
According to Microsoft, the hottest three new tech majors are: Data Mining/Machine Learning/AI/Natural Language Processing Business Intelligence/Competitive Intelligence Analytics/Statistics – specifically Web Analytics, A/B Testing and statistical analysis Tim O’Reilly concurs. Of course, R features prominently in most of these areas — ...
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Slides and replay for “Big Data with Revolution R”
Thanks to everyone who attended our webinar this morning, Big Data Analysis for R Using Revolution R Enterprise, and in particular thanks for all the thoughtful questions during the Q&A session. If you missed the live broadcast, a replay is now available (requires the ability to view WMV files), and you can also download the slides in PDF format....
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Online Certificate Courses in Computational Finance with R
As announced on the R-Sig-Finance mailing list, the University of Washington is now offering a three-course online certificate in computational finance, using the R programming language as the software base. The three courses are: Investment Science R Computing for Computational Finance Portfolio Construction and Risk Management The course is ...
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New R User Groups in Seoul, Denver
We have two new local R user groups to report this week.In Seoul, South Korea R user Chel Hee Lee is the organizer of the GNU R User's Group and Open Statistics Project in Korea. My translate-fu isn't quite up to figuring out when the next meeting is, but you can contact the group organizers here or here.In Denver, Colorado computational stati...
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Poll: Half of SAS users considering a switch
A recent poll of KD Nuggets readers suggests that of those using SAS today, almost half (49.6%) are considering switching to a different system for statistical analysis.The poll was prompted by the recent high court decision in the UK, that affirmed that “WPS is lawful clone of SAS system” (as stated in a WPS press release). The exact poll qu...
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