Publications by Bob Muenchen
Updated: Why R is Hard to Learn
I’ve updated one of my most widely read blog posts, Why R is Hard to Learn. It focuses on the aspects of R which tend to trip up beginners. The new version is over twice as long as the original and it is located under the Articles menu, making it easier to find. Of course my new interactive workshop on DataCamp.com and my up-coming webinars wit...
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Learning R: Live Webinar, Interactive Self-Paced, or Site Visit?
My recent blog post, Why R is Hard to Learn, must have hit a nerve as it was read by over 6,000 people in its first two days online. If you’re using R to augment your work in SAS, SPSS or Stata or you’re considering switching to R, my workshops can help minimize many of those headaches by pointing out the commands and options that frustrate...
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SAS is #1…In Plans to Discontinue Use
I’ve been tracking The Popularity of Data Analysis Software for many years now, and a clear trend is the decline of the market share of the bigger analytics firms, notably SAS and SPSS. Many people have interpreted my comments as implying the decline in the revenue of those companies. But the fields involved in analytics (statistics, data mi...
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r4stats.com 2014 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 260,000 times in 2014. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 11 days for that many people to see it. Click here to see the complete repo...
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Helping Your Organization Migrate to R
by Bob Muenchen As the R programming environment has grown in capability and popularity, so have the number of organizations planning to migrate to it from proprietary tools. I’ve helped members of various organizations transition from SAS, SPSS and/or Stata to R (see Workshop Participants), and the process typically involves the following ...
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It’s Analytics Survey Time!
Every other year Rexer Analytics surveys Data Analysts, Predictive Modelers, Data Scientists, Data Miners, and all other types of analytic professionals, students, and academics regarding the software they use. I then update the main results in The Popularity of Data Analysis Software. Here’s where you can take the survey: Survey Link: ww...
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Google Scholar Finds Far More SPSS Articles; Analytics Forecast Updated
Only last August I wrote that among scholars, the use of R had probably exceeded that of SPSS to become their most widely used software for analytics. That forecast was based on Google Scholar searches focused on one year at a time, from 1995 through 2014. Each year from 2010 through 2014, I re-collected that entire data set just in case Google...
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Fastest Growing Software for Scholarly Analytics: Python, R, KNIME…
In my ongoing quest to “analyze the world of analytics”, I’ve added the following section below to The Popularity of Data Analysis Software: It would be useful to have growth trend graphs for each of the analytics packages I track, but collecting such data is too time consuming since it must be re-collected every year (since search algorit...
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Stata’s Academic Growth Nearly as Fast as R’s
by Bob Muenchen Analytics tools take significant effort to master, so once learned people tend to stick with them for much of their careers. This makes the tools used in academia of particular interest in the study of future trends of market share. I’ve been tracking The Popularity of Data Analysis Software regularly since 2010, and I thanks to...
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R Now Contains 150 Times as Many Commands as SAS
by Bob Muenchen In my ongoing quest to analyze the world of analytics, I’ve updated the Growth in Capability section of The Popularity of Data Analysis Software. To save you the trouble of foraging through that tome, I’ve pasted it below. Growth in Capability The capability of analytics software has grown significantly over the years. It wou...
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