Publications by Ram
The Skills of a Data Miner
Data mining is not only statistics, even if statistics is the most recognized academic component of it. It also includes data cleaning, machine learning and data visualization. The scarce factor is the ability to understand that data and extract value from it. Hal Varian, GoogleThe full article by Luca Sbardella published in Qua...
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What does it mean to be a Data Scientist?
Check out this talk by John Rauser of AMZN at the 2011 Strata Conf. It is an excellent intro to the field. Related To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: Doodling with Data. R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials about learning R and many other topics. Click here if...
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A true data-doodler – Christophe Ladroue (R ddly and plyr on Triathlon Results)
To me, this post by Christophe Ladroue personifies what data doodlers do.They take a dataset that is of interest to them (In his case, his triathlon results) and then they manipulate the numbers to see what insights can be drawn. Most bloggers only show their final results which look great, but for our purposes (for wannabe data doodl...
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Geo-doodlers – Paul Butler and FlowingData
I found this great R-Visualization example via an R-Blogger post that xingmowang made. (One more good reason for why it is important to read lots of field-related blogs!)Here’s the image:If this was merely eye-candy, I would have enjoyed it, but not included it here. But to think that this was done in R — that means the rest of us...
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Get the Basics right – Suggestion for R Beginners
I am always looking for suggestions on how to get better at R, esp. for beginners. So when I see someone who’s gotten adept at it, I ask them how they got there.This weekend, at the Bay Area ACM Data Mining Camp, one person gave me what seemed like a good suggestion. Just wanted to share it here, for anyone else who’s just getting...
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Fusion Tables by Google
Google’s Fusion Tables look impressive, for those who want to try geo-visualizations of their data. You don’t need much programming experience to be able to use it.For those who want to try it out, here’s a nice intro that Kathyrn Hurley presented at the recent SVCC (Silicon Valley Code Camp). When combined with ShpEscape (note ...
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Tips for getting started on Kaggle (datamining)
Ever since I heard about Kaggle.com at this year’s Bay Area Data Mining Camp, I’ve wanted to participate. But I was feeling somewhat intimidated. Jeremy Howard’s “Intro to Kaggle” talk at yesterday’s MeetUp (DataMining for a Cause) was exactly what I needed. He had a number of tips for beginners. His was exactly the talk that I wa...
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O’Reilly’s Data Science Kit – Books
It is not as if I don’t have enough books (and material on the web) to read. But this list compiled by the O’Reilly team should make any data analyst salivate.http://shop.oreilly.com/category/deals/data-science-kit.doThe Books and Video included in the set are: Data Analysis with Open Source ToolsDesigning Data VisualizationsAn Introduction t...
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A pre-requisite to be a Data Scientist
So what should be in the toolkit of people who call themselves a data scientist?A fundamental skill is the ability to manipulate data. A data scientist should be familiar and comfortable with a number of platforms and scripting tools to get the job done. What is difficult in Excel might be trivial in R. And when R struggles, you shoul...
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Simulating Population Growth in Cities Using R
R is great for anyone who wants to get started on learning Simulation. (Both Discrete Event or Agent-based, with stochastic elements in the process.) This post is inspired by Matt Asher’s “quick-and-dirty” R simulation work on Population Growth. Matt uses it to create aRt. I felt that his core idea provided a very good framework...
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