Publications by David Smith
Revolution Newsletter: July 2011
The most recent edition of the Revolution Newsletter is out. The news section is below, and you read the full July edition (with highlights from this blog and community events) online. You can subscribe to the Revolution Newsletter to get it monthly via email. Beta Test Revolution R Enterprise 5.0. Are you running R in a Microsoft environment? ...
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Using R and Motion Charts to analyze financial data
We've noted before that with the RGoogleVis package, it's easy to make motion charts in R, and create a web-based interactive chart that reflects the synchronous movements of two or three variables over time. R user Jeffrey Breen has a great new blog post showing exactly how easy it is, which is best summarized in this tweet: I wanted to follow u...
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10 reasons why a grad student should use R
Kevin Goulding is working on a Master’s degree in Applied Economics at Montana State University, and offers 10 reasons why grad students should choose R for statistical analyses, homework problems, and thesis research: R is free, and lets grad students escape the burdens of commercial license costs. R has really good online documentation; and...
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Fast logistic regression on Big Data with commodity hardware? No problem.
You might think that doing advanced statistical analysis on Big Data is out of reach for those of us without access to expensive hardware and software. For example, back in April SAS was proud to demonstrate being able to run logistic regression on a billion records (and “just a few” variables) in less than 80 seconds. But that feat required ...
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GigaOm article on R, Big Data and Data Science
I'm really pleased that an article I wrote, “5 real-world uses of big data“, has been published in the widely-read technology blog GigaOm. In the article, I review five examples of using data science techniques and R to make sense of some large real-world data sets: Drew Conway's analysis of the Afghanistan attacks data released by Wikileak...
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Growth in data-related jobs
At job-search site indeed.com, you can take a look at trends in the use of keywords used in job postings. As you might expect, job postings containing terms related to making sense from data are on the rise. Here's the growth in job postings mentioning big data: And here's statistician: The drop-off in demand for statisticians 2011 seems to b...
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Visualizing Kickstarter Projects with R
Kickstarter, a social funding platform where individuals can chip in cash to get a worthy project going, just celebrated their 10,000th kickstarted project. Kickstart employee Fred Benenson recognized the achievement by visualizing the funding of music, design, art, game and many other kinds of projects using R and ggplot2. For example, here's a ...
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Uwe Ligges joins R-core
TU Dortmund professor Uwe Ligges is now a member of R-core, the group of 20 leading statisticians and computer scientists who oversee the R Project and develop and maintain the source code for the R engine and its core packages. Uwe has been very active in the R project for many years: he maintains the system that builds Windows binaries of contr...
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A bit of fun with R
R isn't just about serious things like model inference and prediction intervals and big analytics. Sometimes, R lets its hair down and just does weird and wonderful things because … well just because. For example, with a package from Paulo Sonego, it can display your favourite XKCD cartoon: > install.packages("RXKCD", repos="http://R-Forge.R-...
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IBM Netezza: Embrace open source analytics
Earlier this month Thomas Dinsmore, solutions architect for IBM Netezza’s Advanced Analytics team, had a great blog post on why companies should embrace R as an analytics platform. He says: There are three main reasons R should be part of your enterprise analytics architecture: R has capabilities not available in commercial analytics softwa...
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