Revolutions

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02/14/12--07:58: Introduction to R for software developers and data analysts (chan 1003868)

If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area on March 10, the ACM organizing a course on R that you might want to check out. Robert Kabacoff, author of the useful Quick-R website and the book R in Action, will present the course "An introduction to R for software developers and data analysts". The course is sponsored by Revolution Analytics and at just $120 for a full-day course (even less if you're an ACM member), this is great value. Full details are available at the ACM page linked below. Date: Saturday, March 10, 2012 - 8:30am - 5:00pm Venue: eBay,...


02/15/12--14:41: Revolution Newsletter: February 2012 (chan 1003868)

The most recent edition of the Revolution Newsletter is out. The news section is below, and you can read the full February edition (with highlights from this blog and community events) online. You can subscribe to the Revolution Newsletter to get it monthly via email. Revolution Analytics Welcomes New CEO, Dave Rich. Dave joins the Revolution team from Accenture Analytics, where he was most recently Global Managing Director. Former CEO Norman Nie remains on the Revolution Analytics board and will act as Dave's Senior Advisor for Products and Strategy. Read what they both have to say about this exciting change...


02/16/12--16:43: Machine Learning for Hackers (chan 1003868)

"Machine Learning for Hackers" is a new book from O'Reilly Media by Drew Conway and John Myles White. A "hacker", here, is "someone who likes to solve problems and experiment with new technologies", and "Machine Learning" is usually thought of as a black-box, algorithmic approach to producing predictions or classifications from data. This book, however, takes a pleasingly statistical approach to real-life prediction and classification problems. Rather than merely providing a "cookbook" approach to say, building a "who to follow" recommendation system for Twitter, it takes the time to explain the methodology behing the algorithms and give the reader a...


02/17/12--14:44: R in Financial Services Viewpoint newsletter (chan 1003868)

The Winter 2012 edition of Sybase's Financial Services Viewpoint newsletter includes two articles related to R. The "Industry Insight" article "R is Hot" (written by yours truly) is a one-page summary of the R phenomenon: what it is, how it's used, and how it's revolutionizing data analysis. The "Industry Insight" article by SAP's Melinda Wilson, "R swings the pendulum for profit" is a summary of the research by Mike Kane and Casey King into the 2010 "Flash Crash" of the US stock market. Both articles are available for download from Sybase at the link below. Sybase: Financial Services Viewpoint: Winter...


02/17/12--14:57: Because it's Friday: What statisticians actually do (chan 1003868)

So the internet meme of the week is "What I actually do" -- if you haven't come across any of these amusing job descriptions yet, Mashable has a good roundup. Not to be left out, Jason Sullivan has shared one for Statisticians (thanks to Harlan for the tip): Yeah, that's about right. Thanks, Jason, and have a good weekend everyone!


02/20/12--09:46: New R User Group at Berkeley (chan 1003868)

There's a new R user group in Berkely, CA: The Berkeley R Language Beginner Study Group. Join this small group for a step-by-step approach to learn the language R. Each session will be filled with examples and participants are welcome to suggest and present topics. If you have just started with R this is the perfect chance to find out about data analysis with a group of people rather than on your own. The first sessions will be based on tutorials available on r-project.org. The meetings are limited to a small number of participants, but there are still a couple...


02/21/12--12:04: The Uncanny Valley of Big Data (chan 1003868)

Three articles in recent weeks have touched on an important issue related to Big Data and predictive analytics: sometimes, the results can be downright creepy. It's kind of like the "Uncanny Valley" in computer animation: the reason why the human characters in Pixar animations are cartoon-like and not human-like is because trying to make animated humans photorealistic generally results in uncomfortable reactions from the viewer. The animations might look realistic, but something in our animal brain knows something isn't quite right, and it's just ... creepy. The same thing can happen where the rubber meets the road of Big Data...


02/21/12--13:58: Webinar Wednesday: Introduction to Revolution R Enterprise (chan 1003868)

If you haven't yet had a chance to catch my regularly-scheduled webinar, "Revolution R Enterprise - 100% R and More", it's a quick 30-minute introduction to the R language and the added features of Revolution R Enterprise. It's also a chance to ask me any questions you might have about R or Revolution Analytics during the live broadcast (starts at 11AM Pacific time). Details and registration info at the link below. Revolution Analytics webinars: Revolution R Enterprise - 100% R and More


02/22/12--16:08: Introduction to R and Revolution R Enterprise: Slides (chan 1003868)

If you missed this morning's webinar, Revolution R Enterprise, 100% R and More, I've embedded the slides below. Interestingly, about half of today's participants were SAS users, and the remainder R users. The first section introduces open-source R, and the second describes the additional features of Revolution R Enterprise. View more presentations from Revolution Analytics Unfortunately we had a technical hiccup with the recording (a dropped internet connection in the producer booth), so we can't make a replay available as we usually do with our webinars. But you can see a recording of the last time I have this presentation...


02/23/12--16:41: Analyzing weblog data with R (chan 1003868)

The R-chart blog explains how to read a weblog file into R, so you can analyze traffic to a website. For example, here's a page request chart created with R: Now, charts like this are stock-in-trade for tools like Google Analytics, but this is still useful if you want to look at the performance of a site that hasn't been instrumented for analytics. It also allows you to analyze other data in the weblog, such as frequency of HTTP status codes: (Looks like this particular site is experiencing a lot of page-not-found 404 errors.) With access to the raw weblog...