Publications by David Smith
New R User Groups in Lithuania, Birmingham, Taiwan
Three new local R user groups to add to the list today: from Lithuania, Taiwan, and Birmingham (UK). The Chinese Academy of R Software (CARS) serves R users in Taipei (Taiwan). It has been approved by the Ministry of the Interior of Taiwan, and has more than 500 “likes” on its Facebook page. The Birmingham R Users Meeting (with the apt ac...
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Big Data Analytics to Revolutionize Services
Revolution Analytics’ CEO Dave Rich was interviewed by Wikibon’s David Vellante and SiliconAngle’s John Furrier at the Strata 2012 conference last week. Given Dave’s background at Accenture Analytics, the conversation naturally turned to impact of predictive analytics and R on business services. (See the video after the jump, below.) Br...
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Big-data Naive Bayes and Classification Trees with R and Netezza
The IBM Netezza analytics appliances combine high-capacity storage for Big Data with a massively-parallel processing platform for high-performance computing. With the addition of Revolution R Enterprise for IBM Netezza, you can use the power of the R language to build predictive models on Big Data. In the demonstration below, Revolution Analytics...
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Two-minute tutorials for R beginners
R user Anthony Damico has created “Twotorials“: a series of two-minute tutorials for newcomers to R. Topics include how to download and install R, how to do simple arithmetic in r, how to work with data tables in r and many others. The tutorials are especially useful for users of R on Windows, with video demonstrations using the Windows ...
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Kony 2012: How to weaken your argument with charts
If the goal of the Invisible Children campaign, which has received millions of dollars of contributions since the Kony 2012 video went viral, is to convince us that the money is being put to humanitarian efforts, they could do a lot better than this chart: Putting 37% of expenses into programs in Africa is a decent result — many charities ha...
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New R User Group in Milan
Italy now has three local R user groups, thanks to the recent formation of MilanoR in the city of Milan. Founded by R consulting company Quantide's Andrea Spanò, R-core member and University of Milan professor Stefano Iacus, and quantitative consultant Daniele Amberti, MilanoR will be a forum to “exchange knowledge, learn and share tricks...
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In case you missed it: February Roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from February of particular interest to R users. February 29 marked the 12th anniversary of the release of R 1.0.0, and the release of R 2.14.2. A list of commercial vendors who have integrated R with their products for data, analysis, and presentation. The rmr package (part of the RHadoop project...
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Video: Using R in Academic Finance
The slides and replay for Dr Sanjiv Das's webinar, Using R for Analyzing Loans, Portfolios and Risk: From Academic Theory to Financial Practice are now available. I've embedded the slides below: they tell a great story of how Das, after being mistaken for the then-CEO of Citibank (with whom he shares a name) was then led to research (using R so...
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R and Hadoop: Step-by-step tutorials
At the recent Big Data Workshop held by the Boston Predictive Analytics group, airline analyst and R user Jeffrey Breen gave a step-by-step guide to setting up an R and Hadoop infrastructure. Firstly, as a local virtual instance of Hadoop with R, using VMWare and Cloudera's Hadoop Demo VM. (This is a great way to get familiar with Hadoop.) The...
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The Anachronism Machine: The Language of Downton Abbey
I've recently become hooked on the TV series Downton Abbey. I'm not usually one for costume dramas, but the mix of fine acting, the intriguing social relationships, and the larger WW1-era story make for compelling viewing. (Also: Maggie Smith is a treasure.) Despite the widespread criticial acclaim, Downton has met with criticism for some peri...
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