Publications by David Smith
Webinar Tomorrow: Big Data Trees and Hadoop Connection in Revolution R Enterprise 6.1
Tomorrow at 9AM Pacific, Revolution Analytics VP of Product Development Sue Ranney will introduce two key Big Data features of the new Revolution R Enterprise 6.1. Now you can train classification and regression trees on data sets of unlimited size, quickly and using the resources of multiple processors and clusters. (This white paper describes o...
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Create elegant, interactive presentations from R with Slidify
If you often find yourself cutting-and-pasting charts or tables generated in R into PowerPoint or Keynote, you might want to take a look at Slidify. Created by R user Ramnath Vaidyanathan, Slidify is an R package that allows you to use R Markdown to define the slide content and automatically embed R output. This is especially useful if the sou...
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Revolution Newsletter: November 2012
The most recent edition of the Revolution Newsletter is out. The news section is below, and you can read the full November edition (with highlights from this blog and community events) online. You can subscribe to the Revolution Newsletter to get it monthly via email. Now Available: Revolution R Enterprise 6.1 The latest release of Revolu...
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Which programming language is the most concise?
An expressive programming language allows developers to implement algorithms quickly, by using high-level concepts and leaving the details to the language implementation. The result is clearer, more maintainable code that can be created in less time. (Although shorter code isn't always better, especially when taken to extremes.) So which progra...
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A Video Tour of R, for Beginners
Coursera's introductory “Statistics One” course uses R for the practical data analysus exercises. To support course participants, Princeton University grad student Laura Suttle created a series of web videos introducing the R interface. These videos are available to the public, and are a great place for anyone new to R to start. The video...
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R User Conference in Spain: Call for Tutorials
I'm really looking forward to useR! 2013 (the international conference for R users), and not just because it's being held in Spain next year (July 10-12). The program is already coming together, with a great lineup of invited speakers, including R-core member Duncan Murdoch and prolific package authoR Hadley Wickham. You too can be part of the p...
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Upcoming Webinar: Real-time, big-data analytics
A quick heads-up that I'll be presenting another brand-new webinar on Thursday next week (November 29). In Real-time Big Data Analytics: From Deployment to Production, I'll review the process of making predictive models work in real-live operational environments. I'll also tackle those ubiquitous buzz-words “real-time” and “big data”, an...
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Applications open for 2013 John M Chambers Statistical Software Award
In 1998, John Chambers won the ACM Software Systems award for the S language, which the ACM heralded as having “forever altered how people analyze, visualize, and manipulate data”. The R language is “not unlike S”, and John continues pushing the frontiers of statistical computing as a member of the R Core Group. Ang his legacy continues i...
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Using R in the Human Resources department
Ajay Ohri, author of R for Business Analytics, was recently interviewed about using R instead of Excel for human resources management. Human Resources is an increasingly analytics-driven field, with predictive modeling now used to prioritize applicants for interview and to organize workspaces, to give just two examples. As Ajay points out, R get...
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Hadley’s guide to high-performance R with Rcpp
Hadley Wickham has written a comprehensive tutorial for the Rcpp package, which makes it easy to create C++ code embedded in R programs. Hadley explains why you might want to do this in the introduction: Sometimes R code just isn't fast enough – you've used profiling to find the bottleneck, but there's simply no way to make the code any faster...
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