Publications by Joseph Rickert
An Introduction to SAS for R Programmers
by Joseph Rickert Life decisions are usually much too complicated to be attributed to any single cause, but one important reason that I am here at Revolution today is that I ignored suggestions from well-meaning faculty back in graduate school to work more in SAS rather than doing everything in R. There was a heavy emphasis on SAS then: the facul...
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Some R User Group Presentations from Europe
by Joseph Rickert I am beginning to get excited about going to Spain for useR 2013 which will be held at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, so I have been using the links on the Revolution's local user directory webpage to see what the European R user groups are doing. Here are just a few highlights of materials that can be found on the variou...
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Stepwise Regression for Big Data with RevoScaleR
by Joseph Rickert In a recent blog post, Revolution's Thomas Dinsmore announced stepwise regression for big data as a new feature of Revolution R Enterprise 6.2 that is scheduled for general availability later this month. Today, I would like to provide a simple example of doing stepwise regression with rxLinMod() (the RevoScaleR analog of lm()), ...
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Lahman: A New R Package for Baseball Stats
by Joseph Rickert Baseball fans have been serious about statistics since Carl Pearson was a young man (although I doubt that Carl followed the game). It is not clear, though, exactly when baseball statisticians moved from doing descriptive stats into predictive analytics. In his book Super Crunchers, Ian Ayers credits Bill James of Baseball Abstr...
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How R Grows
by Joseph Rickert Saturday morning I was drinking my coffee wondering how much effort goes into R worldwide. (It’s my job.) I noticed that there were 4469 packages on CRAN, and it occurred to me that tabulating the packages by publication date would give some indication of how much effort is being expended to improve packags and keep them up to...
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Trevor Hastie presents glmnet: lasso and elastic-net regularization in R
by Joseph Rickert Even a casual glance at the R Community Calendar shows an impressive amount of R user group activity throughout the world: 45 events in April and 31 scheduled so far for May. New groups formed last month in Knoxville, Tennessee (The Knoxville R User Group: KRUG) and Sheffield in the UK (The Sheffield R Users). An this activity s...
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Social Network Analysis at New Frontiers in Computing 2013
by Joseph Rickert This past Saturday, the New Frontiers in Computing Conference (NFIC 2013), held at Stanford University, explored the theme: Social Network Analysis: It’s Who You Know. The speakers were a well-chosen, eclectic lot who covered a remarkable array of issues in less than a full day. Ian Hersey, former CTO of Attensity spoke on Les...
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Highlights of the Milwaukee Workshop on R and Bioinformatics
by Joseph Rickert On May 10th and 11th, in honor of this being the International Year of Statistics, the Milwaukee Chapter of the American Statistical Association (MILWASA) held a workshop on cutting edge uses of R in Bioinformatics. One objective of the workshop was to show the “nuts and bolts” details of how R with C++ integration and the s...
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Ryan Sheftel: "R on the Trading Desk"
by Joseph Rickert In a post last week, I offered some first impressions about R/Finance 2013. Apparently, I was way off in estimating that 30% of the attendees were academics. The R/Finance organizers were quick to point out that percentage of academics attending the conference has been a constant 10% over the years; and this year was no differen...
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Intro to Parallel Random Number Generation with RevoScaleR
by Joseph Rickert Random number generation is fundamental to doing computational statistics. As you might expect, R is very rich in random number resources. The R base code provides several high quality random number generators including: Wichmann-Hill, Marsaglia-Multicarry, Super-Duper, Mersenne-Twister, Knuth-TAOCP-2002 and L’Ecuyer-CMRG. (Se...
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