Publications by David Smith
How big data and statistical modeling are changing video games
Bill Grosso presented a fascinating webinar about the video gaming industry today, Knowing How People are Playing Your Game Gives You the Winning Hand. He described how over the past three years, game studios have switched from viewing analytics as a primarily descriptive tool to deploying modern data collection practices, machine learning tool...
1720 sym
A list of R packages, by popularity
R package developer (and R-bloggers editor) Tal Galili just published the answers to a question many R users have asked: which are the most popular R packages? He wrote some R code to rank the top 100 packages by number of downloads. Here's the top 10: The source data are the download logs from the RStudio CRAN mirror, whose logs RStudio team ha...
1600 sym 6 img
Computerworld’s Beginners Guide to R
Sharon Machlis is not only the online managing editor at Computerworld, she's also a budding data scientist who recently started learning the R language. To the benefit of all other new R users, she's shared her learnings in an excellent 6-part beginners guide to R, published by Computerworld. It's jam-packed with useful information for anyone ge...
3501 sym
How American Century revolutionized their investment platform with R
American Century Investments is a top-20 mutual fund company with more than 125 billion dollars of assets under management. The quantitative investment group manages 22 funds, and takes an objective, systematic and disciplined approach to determine which stocks to buy and sell. Real-time data and carefully calibrated statistical models are the fo...
2951 sym 2 img
Statistical models are stories about how the data came to be
And in much of Statistics, the way of telling such stories is through maximum likelihood: given a multitude of possible stories (models), which story is most consistent with the data we actually saw? Dave Harris originates the lovely aphorism above in a useful primer on maximum likelihood estimation in R using the mle2 function. Related To leav...
724 sym
R language skills: standard and necessary in today’s world
A recent Business Times article on Singapore's push to become a tech leader mentions Revolution Analytics new Center of Excellence, set up with the support of the Singapore government to train and grow a pool of data scientists and developers in data science. It includes this quote from SAP: “This will ensure we are equipping our workforce ...
1092 sym
A beer recommendation system made with R
If you know a beer you like and want some recommendations for a style of beer to try, check out the yhat Beer Recommender: This neat little app is the product of a recommendation system built using the R language by the folks behind the yhat blog. It's based on about 1.5 million beer reviews from the Beer Advocate. The ratings were read into a P...
1451 sym 2 img
A comprehensive guide to time series plotting in R
As R has evolved over the past 20 years its capabilities have improved in every area. The visual display of time series is no exception: as the folks from Timely Portfolio note that: Through both quiet iteration and significant revolutions, the volunteers of R have made analyzing and charting time series pleasant. R began with the basics, a ...
1235 sym 4 img
Revolution Newsletter: June 2013
The most recent edition of the Revolution Newsletter came out a couple of weeks ago. In case you missed it, the news section is below, and you can read the full June edition (with highlights from this blog and community events) online. You can subscribe to the Revolution Newsletter to get it monthly via email. R is for Analytics: Revoluti...
1907 sym
Create Word documents from R with R2DOCX
If you work in a corporate environment, then the Word document format is still pretty ubiquitous. Personally, I've switched to Google Docs for most of my own documents, but I still receive a couple of Words docs from others via email every day. And it's common request from clients of our Services team to generate documents in the Word format in a...
1860 sym R (141 sym/1 pcs)