Publications by David Smith
New CRAN mirror from Revolution Analytics
There's a new CRAN mirror available: cran.revolutionanalytics.com. It's provided by Revolution Analytics and hosted at Rackspace's high-availability data center in Dallas, TX. Especially for R users located in the western US, using this mirror will provide high-bandwidth access to open-source R downloads and CRAN packages while taking the load of...
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Forbes: Big Data needs to earn its keep
Dan Woods at Forbes makes a salient point about Big Data: it's not good enough merely to spend a ton of money to collect and store data — it needs to earn its keep via data analysis: Let’s say you buy a huge Hadoop cluster along with Revolution Analytics, a productization of the R language that has been adapted to make it work with Hadoop an...
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In case you missed it: November roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from November of particular interest to R users. R 2.14 now includes SVG support for Windows. The submissions for the Applications of R in Business contest are available for viewing online. A tutorial on using the Rdatamarket package to import public datasets into R. Free books on R for multivaria...
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Using R to create a logo: Simple
R user Josh Reich, who we've featured here on the blog before, is also the CEO and co-founder of the new user-friendly bank, Simple. (Confidential to Josh — still waiting on my invite…). So it's no suprise that Simple's logo is rendered using the R language: wave <- function (a, R, p, w) { x <- (0.5 + 0.5*R*sin(p+w*a))*cos(a) y <- (0...
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Mapping prosperity in France with R
The choropleth below (created by Baptiste Coulmont) is a sort of prosperity map of France: the blue areas have high levels of personal income (actually, median household income tax paid divided by the number of household members), while the red areas have the lowest: The map was created with the help of GEOFLA “communes” shapefile (my high-s...
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RHadoop update: new tools for Hadoop map-reduce tasks in R
The open-source RHadoop project to integrate R and Hadoop continues apace, with a new version of the rmr package released this week. Changes in this version improve performance when storing and retrieving R objects from Hadoop with a native serialization process, support for equijoins (a MapReduce-style merge) and some new higher-level R function...
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Revolution Newsletter: December 2011
The most recent edition of the Revolution Newsletter is out. The news section is below, and you can read the full December edition (with highlights from this blog and community events) online. You can subscribe to the Revolution Newsletter to get it monthly via email. Applications of R in Business Contest. A judging panel of industry ex...
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List of public databases from the Washington Post
The Washington Post has put together an excellent list of publicly-accessible databases, ideal for analysis using the R language. You'll find databases from the domains of Census and Demographics (for example, the American Community Survey), Crime and Courts (like this list of federal prosecutions), Transportation and Development (e.g. older driv...
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EMC survey differentiates BI and Data Science
EMC last week published the results of a survey of 462 IT decision makers who self-identified as either a data scientist or business intelligence professional (plus 35 invitees who were attendees at the EMC Data Scientist Summity and/or Kaggle competitors). There's a nice summary of the conclusions at the EMC blog, (where data scientists are des...
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Submit a paper to the R/Finance conference
For anybody using the R language to analyze financial data, the R/Finance conference is the conference of the year. If you have something to share about applied finance with R, the call for papers is now open. The details are below, and the deadline for submissions is January 31, 2012. R/Finance 2012: Applied Finance with RMay 11 and 12, 2012U...
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