Publications by Joseph Rickert
The R Backpages
by Joseph Rickert As an avid newspaper reader (I still get the print edition of the New York Times delivered every Sunday morning) I have always thought that some of the most interesting news is to be found in the back pages. So, in that spirit here are some things that I thought might be fit to print. Plotly has new R interface in Beta Test Plo...
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Counting the Dead in Syria
by Joseph Rickert This past June, the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), a San Francisco based non-profit organization, released its report: “Updated Statistical Analysis of Documentation of Killings in the Syrian Arab Republic”. The report is grim reading, but it represents the necessary, rational work the needs to be done if the worl...
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R and Bayesian Statistics
by Joseph Rickert Drew Linzer, the Bayesian statistician who attracted considerable attention last year with his spot-on, R-based forecast of the 2012 presidential election, recently gave a tutorial on Bayesian statistics to the Bay Area useR Group (BARUG). Drew covered quite a bit of ground running R code that showed how to make use of WinBugs, ...
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The R Backpages 2
by Joseph Rickert In this roundup of R-related news: Domino enables data science collaboration; Plotly adds an R graphics gallery; Revolution Analytics R user group sponsorship applications are open; and Quandl adds new data sets. San Francisco startup takes on collaborative Data Science Domino, a San Francisco based startup, is inviting users to...
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2013 was a good year for R User Group Meetings
by Joseph Rickert R user groups are thriving. By our count of events listed on Revolution Analytics' Community Calendar, there were about 441 face-to-face R meetups worldwide in 2013; up 41% from 312 in 2012. The plot below indicates what the activity looks like on a monthly basis. (Download the data and R code behind this chart here.) My tak...
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A look at the distribution of R package dependencies
by Joseph Rickert For a knitty gritty look at what’s new with R there is no better place to start than Dirk Eddelbuettel’s CRANberries site. Since 2007, the site has been reliably providing near real-time status on CRAN packages. Now, every two hours, CRANberries displays updated information on new R packages, updated R packages and R package...
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Catastrophe Modeling for the Insurance Industry
by Joseph Rickert At a Bay Area R User Group (BARUG) meeting this month hosted by Cisco, Dag Lohmann (the co-founder of Katrisk) gave an electrifying talk on catastrophe modeling for the insurance industry. Catastrophes: cyclones, hurricanes, floods earthquakes, terrorist attacks are rare events (from a statistical point of view) that cause los...
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Tips on Computing with Big Data in R
by Joseph Rickert The Revolution R Enterprise 7.0 Getting started Guide makes a distinction between High Performance Computing (HPC) which is CPU centric, focusing on using many cores to perform lots of processing on small amounts of data, and High Performance Analytics (HPA), data centric computing that concentrates on feeding data to cores, di...
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Quantitative Finance Applications in R
by Daniel Hanson, QA Data Scientist, Revolution Analytics Extracting Financial Data from Internet Source Using R (first in a series) Earlier this month, a colleague and I attended a presentation on Computational Finance in R, given by Guy Yollin of the University of Washington Applied Mathematics faculty, at a meeting of the Seattle useR Group. ...
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How to ask for R help
by Stephen Welle, Senior Support Engineer at Revolution Alalytics and Joseph Rickert For someone trying to learn any new technology getting help with a problem on a public forum can be stressful. Knowing where to go, deciding how to pose a question and figuring out how to deal with a response can be challenging. Moreover, an unpleasant interact...
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