Publications by David Smith
Parallel processing in R for Windows
The doSMP package (and its companion package, revoIPC), previously bundled only with Revolution R, is now available on CRAN for use with open-source R under the GPL2 license. In short, doSMP makes it easy to do SMP parallel processing on a Windows box with multiple processors. (It works on Mac and Linux too, but it's been relatively easy to do p...
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Alabama is a foreign country
Faculty and students of Iowa State University Department of Statistics published online an analysis of the data on 2009 distributions of the US Stimulus funds, aka the Recovery And Reinvestment Act. (The analysis was published in March last year as part of the Design for America competition, but I only recently came across it.) The analyses and ...
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Challenge: Visualizing the US Federal Budget
Google today announced a Data Visualization Challenge that is well suited to the graphical capabilities of R. The goal is to visualize the US Federal budget from the point of view of the taxes an individual pays. The data are available from whatwepayfor.com — their FAQ gives details about the source of the data and the philosophy of making how ...
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The R-Files: Call for Nominations
We run an occasional series here on Revolutions called The R-Files, in which we profile members of the R community. Our intention with this series is to call out noteworthy work being done for open-source R and popular CRAN packages, and shine a light on some of the noteworthy individuals that make up what is now a broad community of contributors...
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Survey: R used by more data miners than any other tool
According to respondents of the 2010 Rexer Analytics Data Miner Survey, open source R is the most commonly-used analysis tool amongst data miners: After a steady rise across the past few years, the open source data mining software R overtook other tools to become the tool used by more data miners (43%) than any other. STATISTICA, which has als...
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R 2.13.0 scheduled for April 13
As announced yesterday by the R Core Team, the next major update to R will be released on April 13. R 2.13.0 is the next major release of R, which gets major updates approximately every six months. This also indicates that R 2.12.2 is the last patch level of the R 2.12 series, and so the next version of Revolution R will be based on R 2.12.2. R-a...
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New R User Group in Orange County, CA
The Orange County R User Group was formed to bring local R users together in a friendly, business-oriented environment. This is the fifth R user group in California. Founder Ray DiGiacomo, Jr. says, “I feel this group is necessary because the current Los Angeles and San Diego R User Groups are quite far from Orange County. Also, Orange Coun...
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Webinar on integrating R with applications, March 16
A quick reminder that Revolution Analytics' CTO David Champagne will be hosting a live webinar tomorrow (March 16) on Integrating R into 3rd Party and Web Applications Using RevoDeployR. Designed for application developers, this webinar will cover publishing R scripts to the RevoDeployR server, and integrating their results into Web applications...
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How the New York Times uses R for Data Visualization
The New York Times introduced R to the world with a feature article in 2009, and has been using R for many years to support its pioneering presentation data analysis and visualization, under the direction of graphics editor Amanda Cox. Last week, the New York R User Group's featured speaker was Amanda Cox, where she presented … how R is used i...
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$3.2M in prizes for predicting hospitalization
Heritage Health and Kaggle have teamed up to create the biggest data science competition thus far: the Heritage Health Prize, which challenges competitors to build a statistical model to predict the number of days a person is likely to spend in hospital over the next year, based on (anonymized) factors such as demographics, medical visits and tre...
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