Publications by Randy Zwitch
Learning R has really made me appreciate SAS
For the past 18 months, it seems like all I’ve heard about in the digital marketing industry is “big data”, and with that, mentions of using Hadoop and R to solve these sorts of problems. Why are these tools the most often mentioned? Because they are open source, i.e. free of charge! But as I’ve tried to learn R, I keep asking myself�...
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Getting Started Using R, Part 1: RStudio
Despite my preference for SAS over R, there are some add-ons to “basic” R that I’ve found that have made my learning process way easier. While I’m still in my infancy in learning R, I feel like once I found these additional tools, my ability to use R to get work done improved significantly. In this first post of three, I’ll discuss RS...
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Video: R, RStudio, Rcmdr & rattle
I did a screencast for my co-workers to show how to get started with R, specifically what a base installation of R looks like, then showing how to improve your workflow using RStudio, Rcmdr or rattle. The examples are somewhat pedestrian, but it gives a feel for what using R actually looks like. If you have any questions, comments, or jeers abo...
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Video: Overlay Histogram in R (normal, density, another series)
This video explains how to overlay histogram plots in R for 3 common cases: overlaying a histogram with a normal curve, overlaying a histogram with a density curve, and overlaying a histogram with a second data series plotted on a secondary axis. Note: Towards the end of the video (maybe minute 14 or so), I make a language error when talking abo...
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Video: SQL queries in R using sqldf package
This video covers how to run SQL queries using the ‘sqldf’ package within R. This sqldf tutorial was part of a Keystone Solutions podcast discussion about data science and what skills beginning analysts should be learning to improve their skill set. The example files from this tutorial can be downloaded from this link: Example Data files Vid...
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(not provided): Using R and the Google Analytics API
(not provided) terms from Google average 35%-60% of all Google organic search terms For power users of Google Analytics, there is a heavy dose of spreadsheet work that accompanies any decent analysis. But even with Excel in tow, it’s often difficult to get the data just right without resorting to formula hacks and manual table formatting. T...
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The Fun of Error Trapping: R Package Edition
For the last month or so I’ve been working on an R package to make accessing the Adobe (Omniture) Digital Marketing Suite Reporting API easier. As part of this development effort, I’m at the point where I’m intentionally introducing errors into my function inputs, trying to guess some of the ways useRs might incorrectly input arguments in...
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Automated Re-Install of Packages for R 3.0
With the big release of R 3.0 today comes an unfortunate side effect of needing to re-install all of your packages. Luckily, R provides a pretty easy method of getting all of your packages into a list for automated re-install. Here’s how to do it for OSX users with a default install to the Library: For Windows users, the same general process...
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Instructions for Installing & Using R on Amazon EC2
If you’re an R user, you’ve surely heard all the hype around ‘big data’ and how R is commonly used to analyze these volumes of data. One thing that’s often missing from the discussion is HOW to work around issues using big data and R, specifically how to deal with the fact that R stores all its objects in-memory. While you can use packa...
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Innovation Will Never Be At The Push Of A Button
@randyzwitch @benjamingaines @usujason I am envisioning the data science equivalent of an autonomous vehicle pileup. — Todd Belcher (@toddmetrics) May 16, 2013 Recently, I’ve been getting my blood pressure up reading (marketing) articles about “big data” and “data science”. What saddens me about the whole discussion is that there i...
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