Publications by David Smith
Math symbols in R charts: a cheat sheet
If you're creating a scientific graphic in the R language, there's a good chance you'll be wanting to include some mathematical symbols somewhere on the chart. You might want to use a symbol like μ as an axis label, annotate a curve with simple math like x2, or even put a complete equation like: in the title. You can do this easily in R using t...
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More reasons not to use Excel for modeling
As if the London Whale nearly bankrupting Chase Bank wasn't lesson enough, we now hear that an Excel error impacted the conclusions of a major economics paper that influenced the recent austerity policies in the US, UK and elsewhere. Matt Frost says enough is enough, and implores to everyone to stop using error-prone point-and-click tools, and ...
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Open Source software’s opportunity to reform government
The results from the 2013 Future of Open Source Survey are in — thanks to everyone who contributed by completing the survey. You can read an overview of the results here, or see the detailed breakdowns in the slides at the end of this post. For me, one of the most interesting nuggets from the survey is that a plurarity of respondents believed ...
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Learn how to analyze data with R with Coursera’s "Data Analysis" videos
If you didn't manage to catch Coursera's Data Analysis course, don't despair. Instructor Jeff Leek has made the course videos available on YouTube, which you can review at your leisure to learn how to plan, carry out, and communicate analyses of real data sets with R. (The course assumes you already have familiarity with R, so if you're new to t...
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Revolution Newsletter: April 2013
The most recent edition of the Revolution Newsletter is out. The news section is below, and you can read the full April 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 6.2. Released today, this update fu...
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Webinar May 1: What’s new in Revolution R Enterprise 6.2
Revolution R Enterprise 6.2 is now available, and includes many new features that enhance the performance, scalability and enterprise readiness of R. On May 1, product manager Thomas Dinsmore will give an overview of the new features in a 30-minute webinar. You can register for the webinar (and the post-webinar slides and replay) at the link belo...
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How UpStream uses R for Attribution Analysis
Major retailers like Williams Sonoma use UpStream Software for marketing analytics, including revenue attribution, targeting, and optimization. In the video below Tess Nesbitt (senior statistician at UpStream) describes how she uses Revolution R Enterprise and Hadoop to figure out the impact on various marketing channels (for example direct mai...
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NYT uses R to investigate NFL draft picks
Last week, the New York Times published online an interactive tool to explore NFL draft picks, revealing the fact that there's not much relationship between an early pick and the star performers in the season: Kevin Quealy, graphics editor at the NYT, detailed the process behind creating this graphic on his chartsnthings blog. He and others on...
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Explaining real-time predictive analytics with big data (video)
In my presentation to the Strata Santa Clara 2013 conference earlier this year, my goal was to give a succinct (under 20 minutes!) explanation of three terms that are two often used as mere buzzwords: predictive analytics, real time, and big data. You can download the slides for my presentation, Real-time Big Data Analytics: From Deployment to P...
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What’s new in Revolution R Enterprise 6.2 (video)
If you missed last week's webinar, product manager Thomas Dinsmore shared details of the new features in Revolution R Enterprise 6.2 in the video below: You can also download slides of the presentation at the link below. Revolution Analytics webinars: What's New in Revolution R Enterprise 6.2 Related To leave a comment for the author, please ...
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