Publications by David Smith
A guide to speeding up R code
Noam Ross recently shared a very useful guide to speeding up your R code. Get a bigger computer (for example, renting an instance on the Amazon cloud for a few cents an hour) Use parallel programming techniques Using the R byte-compiler Profiling and benchmarking your code Using high-performance packages (like xts, for time series) And lastly,...
1108 sym
In case you missed it: April 2013 Roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from April of particular interest to R users: A critique of a SAS whitepaper comparing the performance of SAS, R and Mahout. A video presentation from statistician Tess Nesbitt at UpStream, who uses GAM survival models in R for marketing attribution analysis. The April edition of the Revolution An...
2348 sym
Top 3 R resources for beginners
The community team at Revolution Analytics has just updated this list of resources to learn about R on the Web. Included is this list of the top 3 resources for absolute beginners getting started with R: An Introduction to R – The free, “official” CRAN R Manual Try R – a short course that lets you jump right in Computing for Data Analy...
1044 sym
Statistics vs Data Science vs BI
As someone who trained as a statistician, I've always struggled with that title. I love the rigor and insight that Statistics brings to data analysis, but let's face it: Statistics — the name — has always had a bit of a branding problem. Telling someone I was a statistician was more likely to conjure up images of me counting runs at a basebal...
2827 sym 4 img
Revolution Newsletter: May 2013
The most recent edition of the Revolution Newsletter is out. The news section is below, and you can read the full May edition (with highlights from this blog and community events) online. You can subscribe to the Revolution Newsletter to get it monthly via email. Gaming Analytics FTW! Join us on 13Jun13 at 10:00 AM PDT for our webinar wit...
2115 sym
R 3.0.1 released
The R core group has quickly followed up with a patch to R version 3. Announced yesterday, R 3.0.1 (code name: “Good Sport”) improves serialization performance with big objects, improves reliability for parallel programming and fixes a few minor bugs. (You can find the complete list of changes in the NEWS file.) The source distribution and Wi...
1064 sym
R programming challenge: Escape the zombie horde
So when the world is taken over by a Zombie horde, you're going to want to figure out a way to get the human population to safety. This R script by econometrician Francis Smart won't help you do that exactly, but given a list of waypoints to navigate through zombie-infested lands to a safe house, it will tell you how many how many members of you...
1737 sym 2 img
Get your questions answered about Open Data
The OpenData StackExchange site has just launched in beta, and looks to be a great resource for open data sources. Like StackOverflow for programming and CrossValidated for statistics, OpenData is is a question and answer site for developers and researchers interested in open data. There's no R tag yet (though that would be nice for data sourc...
1044 sym
Vote in the KDnuggets poll on Analytics Software
The 14th annual KDnuggets poll measuring use of analytics software is open for voting. The poll asks, “What Predictive Analytics, Big Data, Data mining, Data Science software you used in the past 12 months for a real project?” and allows up to 20 choices from commercial software, open source software, and “big data” software. R was the le...
949 sym
7th R/Rmetrics workshop in Switzerland, June 30-July 4
The 7th annual R/Rmetrics Workshop om Computational Finance and Financial Engineering will take place June 30-July 4 in the beatiful alpine setting of Lake Thune, Switzerland. This is an intimate workshop limited to around 50 participants, and features tutorials from leading practitioners in finance with R, with a special focus on the Rmetrics�...
2109 sym