Publications by David Smith
Contributions to the R Project
The R Project would not exist without the contributions of the R Core Group, the 21 volunteer statisticians and computer scientists from around the world who have donated their time and expertise to create the R langauge, its core packages, and manage its regular release and binary distribution process via the CRAN network. Many Core Group member...
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Sentiment Analysis for Airlines via Twitter
Last weekend here in the states was the 4th of July long weekend, one of the busier air travel days of the year. As anyone who flies in the States knows, with air travel often comes frustration, and in this social media age many express their frustration on Twitter: The image above comes from a tutorial on text mining with R given by Jeffrey Br...
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New R User Group in Argentina
A new local R user group has formed in Buenos Aires, Argentina, under the succinct name “.aR”. They're currently putting together the agenda for their first meeting, and are looking for speakers with expertise in the BioConductor project and Finance. If you'd like to join the group, check out the Spanish-language website for .aR, or follow @a...
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How Marketo uses Revolution R Enterprise
Marketo, a leading marketing automation company, relies on data analysis to implement the features in its hosted application that help companies get the most out of their marketing dollar. We've just published a case study about how Marketo uses Revolution R Enterprise and the R language to analyze the massive data sets generated by their custom...
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High-quality R graphics on the Web with SVG
If you want the graphics you create with R to look their best, in general it's best to go for a vector-based graphics format instead of a raster-based format. Common formats like GIF and JPG are raster-based: the image is composed of pixels, and if you don't choose a high enough resolution, you're likely to lose fine details and/or the image will...
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R 2.13.1 released
As announced by the R core team, R 2.13.1 has been released on schedule today. For those who build R themselves, updated source code is available now; pre-built binaries will propagate through the CRAN network over the next couple of days. This update includes some minor bug fixes to graphics, fixes to some edge cases in the class systems, and so...
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NYT on the importance of reproducible research
Yesterday's New York Times includes a great article on the failure of some genetic tests for cancer detection, and the flaws in the research that led to them. The article features quotes from Keith Baggerly of MD Anderson Cancer Center, and includes a photo of him and colleague Kevin Coombes in front of a page of R code: The article highlights t...
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In case you missed it: June Roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from June of particular interest to R users. Highlights of presentations from the R/Finance 2011 conference. Trulia uses R and statistical models to map local crime. Resources for data mining with R. K-means clustering on large data sets with the RevoScaleR package. Revolution Analytics' CTO David...
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A surprising(?) prediction about the S&P 500
Financial analyst Greg Troccoli was a lone wolf when he predicted in July 2010 that “If the [S&P500] Index held at or above our proprietary support zone (1000.00- 950.00 region), it would eventually trade to a new historical high within 12 – 18 months (July- December 2011 timeframe)”. For reference, the S&P500 all-time high was 1565.15, ...
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Paul Murrell on Incorporating Images in R Charts
Thanks to everyone at who attended last night's Bay Area R User Group meeting, and a special thanks to our hosts Socialize (a company that makes a mobile SDK for application developers that increases user engagement) who were very generous in letting the group use their San Francisco digs for the meeting. Reflexive thanks also go to the Revolut...
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