Publications by David Smith
What language is R written in?
On of the nice things about R is that a lot if it is written in the R language. That means, as an R user, if you want to see how R calculates a certain statistic, or you want to modify an existing function for your own use, you can just look at the R code by typing the name of the functions. Sometimes, though, you'll see just a couple of lines of...
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Big Analytics: Closing the "clue gap" with Big Data
There's been an growing discussion over the past couple of years on the topic of Big Data: how to deal with the situation when you have more data than can be conveniently managed and analyzed by traditional software tools. But Big Data has little intrinsic value in its own right: its value is only realized when you can deploy analytical expertise...
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Help showcase R with the "Applications in Business" contest
By showing off what R can do for businesses, you could share in $20,000 in prizes from Revolution Analytics. R is already used in many companies around the world, but many people who could benefit from using R still don't know what it is or how it could help them. That's why we're reaching out to the expertise of the R community to help us showca...
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Discussion thread on R vs SAS for businesses
There's an interesting discussion thread on LinkedIn going on now on the relative benefits of R versus SAS in the commercial sector. Oleg Okun kicks off the discussion with this question: Did anyone have to justify to a prospect/customer why R is better than SAS? What arguments did you provide? Did your prospect/customer agree with them? Why do ...
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KDNuggest: R most commonly used software for data mining & analytics
In a poll with 570 respondents conducted last month at KDNuggets, the R software was the most frequent response to the question, “What programming languages you used for data mining / data analysis in the past 12 months?”. The results are tabled below (respondents could select more than one response): In another poll conducted earlier this y...
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Webinar: Leveraging R in Hadoop Environments
On Wednesday September 21, Revolution Analytics' CTO David Champagne will give a live webinar introducing three new open-source packages for R and Hadoop, which make it possible to work with Hadoop data in R, and bring in-database R analytics to Hadoop. Here are the details: Date: Wednesday, September 21st Time: 10:00AM – 10:30AM Pacific Time...
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Fortune: Data Science is the hot new job
An article in the September 5 issue of Fortune Magazine notes that despite the economy, companies are scrambling to hire data scientists: Data scientists have been a fixture at online companies like Google (GOOG) and Amazon (AMZN) for years. But these days organizations as diverse as Wal-Mart (WMT) and Foursquare are hiring computer science expe...
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Analyzing big data in R: two presentations from useR! 2011
At last month's useR! 2011 conference at Warwick University, there were two talks on the RevoScaleR package for big data statistics in R. The first was a keynote presentation from Revolution Analytics' Chief Scientist, Lee Edlefsen. Here is the overview of his talk, Scalable Data Analysis in R: For the past several decades the rising tide of t...
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In case you missed it: August Roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from August of particular interest to R users. A contest to showcase applications of R for businesses is offering $20,000 in prizes from Revolution Analytics. Three new open-source packages integrating R and Hadoop will be introduced by Revolution Analytics' CTO David Champagne in a webinar on Sep...
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The effectiveness of links shared on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube
The bitly blog has posted a really interesting analysis of the effectiveness of links shared via the social-media services Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Here, effectiveness is measured by the “half-life” of a link: the amount of time it takes for that link to generate half the clicks it will ever attract. They summarize their results in this...
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