Publications by David Smith
SAP integrates R with HANA
We can add SAP to the list of vendors offering R integration with their products. InformationWeek reports that the new SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analysis model provides a graphical user interface to R. Created in reaction to “competitive and market forces, including the momentum of open source R”, the new module provides in-database p...
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Simplify working with times and dates in R
R has some very powerful built-in features for working with dates, times, and time-zones. But power and flexibility rarely correlate with ease-of-use, and this is no exception. The lubridate package comes to the rescue, make things a bit easier when working with chronological data in R. The paper Dates and Times Made Easy with lubridate provide...
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Revolution Newsletter: March 2012
The most recent edition of the Revolution Newsletter is out. The news section is below, and you can read the full March edition (with highlights from this blog and community events) online. You can subscribe to the Revolution Newsletter to get it monthly via email. Download Revolution R Enterprise, free for Academics. The new features of ...
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New R User Group in Montréal
The Biology Department at McGill University in Québec, Canada has been running a series of R workshops since 2010. Past topics have included Generalized Additive Models, Linear Mixed-effects Models and a four-part Intro to R series — follow the links and look at the bottom of each page for some very useful course notes. Over the past yea...
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R/Finance 2012 program announced, registration open
Registration is now open for R/Finance 2012 in Chicago, the conference devoted to applications of R in the financial sector. The program has also been announced, with topics including: modelling insurance claim reserves; risk management in power markets; peer performance of hedge funds; hedging event risk; operational risk measurement with R ...
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R, Twitter and McDonald’s
Ed Chen is a data scientist at Twitter, so he's accustomed to working with big data and complex models. In an interview with MIT Technology Review, he describes his data science toolbox: A common pattern for me is that I'll code a MapReduce job in Scala, do some simple command-line munging on the results, pass the data into Python or R for furth...
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Students: Help improve R with the Google Summer of Code
The Google Summer of Code project provides funding for students to write and contribute code to open-source projects of interest to Google. And given that R is widely used at Google, it's certainly a project of significant interest. So for the fifth year running the R Project will mentor students as part of GSOC 2012 to develop packages and impro...
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Bigger data, better intelligence for government
Tomorrow (at 2PM Eastern on Thursday), the White House White House Office of Science and Technology Policy will host a 90-minute forum on Challenges and Opportunities in Big Data. You can watch the event live at the previous link, and see federal government science heads from OSTP, NSF, NIH, DoE, DoD, DARPA and USGS outline how their agencies ...
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See how Deloitte uses R for actuarial analysis
Many thanks to Jim Guszcza (Predictive Analytics lead at Deloitte Consulting and Assistant Professor at UW-Madison) who gave a great webinar presentation yesterday on actuarial analysis with R. Jim's demo (starting at the 20 minute mark in the video replay below) is a great way to get a sense of how R is used for exploratory data analysis and ...
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R 2.15.0 "Easter Beagle" is released
The R core group today announced the availability of R 2.15.0, codenamed “Easter Beagle”. If you build R yourself, the new source distribution (including packages for Debian Linux) is available now, and binaries for Windows, MacOS and Linux will be available from your local CRAN mirror over the next couple of days. (As of this writing, Wind...
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