Publications by David Smith
In case you missed it: April Roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from April of particular interest to R users. The Heritage Health Prize, a competition to build predictive models for hospitalization with USD$3.2M in prizes, is open. The Inside-R.org community site now provides the ability to search and view the help files for CRAN packages. Revolution R Enterpr...
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New R User Groups in Turin, Belgrade
Two new local R user groups in Europe to announce this week. For R users in Serbia, there's a new group based in Belgrade. You can find more information about the group and upcoming meetings at the Croatian-language blog Sav tar R. And for R users in northern Italy, there's a new group based in Turin: Torino R net is a users group dedicated to b...
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Mapping locations in R with the Data Science Toolkit
Pete Warden's Data Science Toolkit (which we mentioned briefly last week) is an open-source information server that provides an API you can query for information useful for building data science applications, like identifying proper names in unstructured text, or converting IP addresses to lat/long coordinates. You can make queries via the Web i...
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Hadley Wickham’s R Development Master Class coming to SF
Hadley Wickham, the Rice professor and prolific R hacker best known as the author of the ggplot2 graphics package, will be coming to San Francisco June 8-9 to deliver his new R Development Master Class (in conjunction with Revolution Analytics). This course will build on the skills of basic R programmers with instruction in advanced R programmin...
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Hacking the Kinect with R
I was browsing through the draft abstract booklet for this year's worldwide R user conference useR! 2011, and noticed this abstract: KinectR – Kinect interface to RLandon Jensen Microsoft launched the Kinect for Xbox 360 in late 2010 and it quickly broke records as the fastest selling consumer electronics device in history (8 million units so...
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Quantifying gravitational lensing by dark matter
The latest prediction competition at Kaggle is literally “out of this world”: the goal is to quantify the shape of 2-D images of galaxies from a simulated telescope, to test models for how invisible dark matter in the Universe distorts the images through gravitational lensing (as shown in the image below; see the FAQ for more details). If yo...
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Participate in the 2011 Rexer Data Mining Survey
Last year's Rexer Data Mining Survey reported that R is used by more data miners than any other tool. If you're using R for data mining or data analysis generally, be counted at the 2011 Data Miner Survey (use access code: RL3X2), which closes in early June. Here's some background on the survey: The survey is conducted annually by Rexer Analyt...
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KDnuggets: R used in 1 in 4 analytics projects
The most recent KDnuggets poll asked, “Which data mining/analytic tools you used in the past 12 months for a real project”. Amongst all commercial and open-source tools, open-source R was the second most-frequently cited, by 23.3% or about 1 in 4 respondents. (The most frequent was the open-source data mining tool, RapidMiner.) See the full p...
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New online R courses from Statistics.com
Online training provider Statistics.com has introduced a couple of new R-related courses which are well worth checking out. These are all self-paced on-line courses, with materials by and interactive feedback from leading R gurus. Current R users looking to take their programming skills to the next level will be particularly interested in the Ad...
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Presentations from R/Finance 2011 available
Last month's R/Finance 2011 conference in Chicago was an outstanding event, bringing together some of the best minds in applying R to financial data. Presentations from the speakers are now available for download, with a wealth of useful information there for anyone working in quantiative finance. Not to be missed, though, is John Bollinger's (ye...
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