Publications by David Smith
Speeding up simulations with Amazon EC2
Over at Cerebral Mastication, JD Long tells a characteristically entertaining and informative story about how he uses R to run stochastic simulations of insurance portfolios and reinsurance treaties. A typical job involves 10,000 simulations, and when each estimate takes over 20 seconds you’re talking some serious time to get the job done. Fo...
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Video: What is R?
By popular demand, we’ve made the video of our 30-minute webcast “The R Project” available on YouTube so that everyone can easily watch it. If you (or a friend!) have ever wondered what this R thing is all about, this is the video for you. Here’s the first part:Because of YouTube restrictions it’s split up into four parts, but you can f...
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Future of Open Source Survey
Our good friends at North Bridge Venture Partners have just opened the 2010 Future of Open Source Survey, an annual look at the state of open source technology and business models, the driving factors in rising adoption of open source products and how the market for open-source software is evolving. Anyone who uses open-source software in the co...
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Making publication-ready tables with xtable
When you use R at the command-line, the textual output is limited by the medium: one monospaced font, with no typesetting of any kind. That’s great when you’re doing exploratory analysis, but what about when you want to include R output in a report or publication? In other words, what if you want to convert this Analysis of Variance table: ...
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Bay Area meet-up Tuesday: John Chambers speaks, cocktail reception
At tomorrow’s meeting of the Bay Area R User’s Group, ACM Software Systems award winner and R Core Group member John Chambers will give a keynote talk on the R language. The talk, titled Interfaces and Paradigms, will explore choices for computing with data with visits along the way to the history of R, reasons for the growth of R, and the...
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How to make a mosaic plot in R
Mosaic plots (aka treemaps) are a great way to visualize hierarchical data. A collection of rectangles represents all the elements to be visualized (customers, news items, blog posts), with the size and color of the rectangles coding attribute. But what makes this chart unique is the arrangement of the elements: where there is hierarchy (customer...
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R project named in Intelligent Enterprise 2010 Editor’s Choice Awards
Intelligent Enterprise has announced its 2010 “Editors Choice” Awards, and the R project is included as one of twelve “Companies to Watch” in the Business Intelligence category.R Project is an open-source statistical programming environment that is winning broad praise and accelerating uptake as a language for in-database analytics. The l...
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SPSS Co-Founder Tex Hull Joins REvolution Computing
We’re proud to announce that Tex Hull, who together with REvolution CEO Norman Nie created the first version of SPSS, has joined the REvolution team. Tex will be working with Norman and our CTO David Champagne to take REvolution R Enterprise to the next level, specifically to improve its scalability to handle very large data sets.You can read m...
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R IDE and debugger now available for 64-bit Windows; Webinar Tuesday
We’ve just upgraded REvolution R Enterprise to version 3.1 and expanded the available platforms to include 64-bit Windows. (REvolution R Enterprise is our subscription-based distribution of R.) This means that you can now create R programs on Windows that use all of your available memory, instead of being constrained by the 3Gb limit imposed by...
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Newspaper flubs probability calculation
That headline’s right up there with “Dog Bites Man” for shock value, but the Daily Express in the UK isn’t one to let mere probability stand in the way of a sensational headline like “Mum beats odds of 50 million to one to have 3 babies on same date“. As Ben Goldacre helpfully explains, the probability is actually a modest 133,000-to-...
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