Publications by David Smith
The R-Files: Jeff Ryan
“The R-Files” is an occasional series from Revolution Analytics, where we profile prominent members of the R Community. Name: Jeff Ryan Profession: Owner/Principal at Lemnica; Committee Member at R/Finance Nationality: American Years Using R: 8 Known for: R/Finance Conference, quantmod and xts packages Jeffrey Ryan is a Chicago-based quan...
4265 sym 4 img 1 tbl
The Luck and Skill of Scrabble
Scrabble is a game that involves both skill and luck. There's skill in knowing the words you can play and — especially — the most advantageous ways to play them. But there's also luck in the tiles you draw randomly from the bag: get saddled with a rack containing four I's and there's usually not much you can do. That's why professional Scrabb...
6400 sym 4 img
Social reception for R enthusiasts at Joint Statistics Meetings
At the JSM 2011 conference in Miami on Monday, August 1, Revolution Analytics will be hosting a cocktail reception for R users, and anyone interested in R. From 5:30-7:30 at Emeril's Miami Beach House (in the JSM host hotel), we'll have appetizers, drinks, and the opportunity to socialize with R users from around the word. There will also be a dr...
1031 sym 2 img
Program for useR! 2011 available
The final program for the worldwide user conference, useR! 2011, is now available as a downloadable booklet (PDF, 7Mb). Revolution Analytics is very proud to sponsor this annual gathering of R users from around the world, and the program includes an outstanding lineup of speakers from the R Core Group, package developers, users in industry and ac...
1947 sym
Financial Engineering with R
At the InformationManagement blog, Steve Miller talks about the applications of R to financial engineering, and reviews David Ruppert's book Statistics and Data Analysis for Financial Engineering. InformationManagement: Statistics and Financial Engineering Related To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on thei...
653 sym
With byte compiler, R 2.14 will be even faster
In a presentation at the JSM 2011 conference in Miami yesterday, R core member Luke Tierney revealed that the next major update to R, R 2.14, will feature improved speed when processing interpreted R code, thanks to standard use of the new byte compiler feature. The byte compiler was introduced with R 2.13, but while R developers could use it f...
2005 sym
How Google uses R to make online advertising more effective
At JSM 2011 today, three Google employees (amongst the more than 20 Google delegates there) gave a little insight into how statistical analysis with R yields better results for companies using Google’s various advertising products. Bill Heavlin from Google kicked off the session with a talk about conditional regression models, a statistical tec...
3683 sym
Statisticians at JSM consider themselves "Data Scientists"
At the JSM 2011 conference in Miami earlier this week, we conducted an informal poll of attendees on their attitudes to respect to Big Data, statistical software, and data science. JSM is the largest gathering of statisticians in North America, and attendees were invited to complete a survey after logging into the Wi-Fi network. Of the 190 resp...
1774 sym 2 img
Upcoming R training classes, live from the experts
Revolution Analytics is hosting several hands-on R training classes over the next few months, with in-person instruction from two leading package authors and experts from the R community. Diethelm Würtz from ETH Zurich will give a two-day master class on Portfolio Selection and Optimization in Practice. Prof Würtz leads the Rmetrics project, an...
2023 sym
How ANZ uses R for credit risk analysis
At last month's R user group meeting in Melbourne, the theme was “Experiences with using SAS and R in insurance and banking”. There, Hong Ooi from ANZ (Australia and New Zealand Banking Group) gave a presentation on “Experiences with using R in credit risk”. I didn't get to see the presentation myself, but the slides tell a great story a...
3259 sym 2 img