In a recent talk to the DC R User Group, Anthony Damico presented the following handy flowchart for learning to do survey analysis with R (actually, it's a pretty good flowchart for learning R for any application): Since they're not clickable above, here are the resource links: Learn R by watching two‐minute videos on http://twotorials.com Read the “Getting Started...

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Since 2007, Rexer Analytics has been conducting periodic surveys to measure the analytic behaviors, views and preferences of data miners and analytic professionals. In the last survey, conducted in 2011, more than 1300 analysts shared information about the data analysis software packages they use. (The results of all Rexer surveys are available free to anyone who requests them.) In...

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The tagline for O'Reilly Strata conference series — Making Data Work — has meant that it's always been popular with practitioners, primarily data scientists working with Big Data in real-world environments. Recent Strata events have also attracted more business-oriented attendees, with events focused more on processes and outcomes than on the implementation details. On Tuesday February 26, Strata Santa...

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If the scores are tied in this weekend's Super Bowl and the game rests on the outcome of a field goal attempt, the chart below will tell you the chances of the goal being made. All you need to know is the distance of the kick: What this says that if the kick is longer than 50 yards, there's...

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If you weren't one of the almost 2000 people who signed up for yesterday's webinar "Using R with Hadoop", the replay and slides are now available. During the webinar, Jeffrey Breen (Principal at Think Big Academy) talked about extracting analytics from data in Hadoop and covered: How to use R and Hadoop Hadoop streaming Various R packages and RHadoop...

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While Nate Silver got a lot of the attention for correctly forecasting the US presidential election, other forecasters were just as succesful. Drew Linzer used the R language to build the statistical model behind votamatic.org, and was able to predict the outcome of the election months before most pundits. Drew's model initially relied mostly on fundamental quantities: the president’s...

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The most recent edition of the Revolution Newsletter is out. The news section is below, and you can read the full January edition (with highlights from this blog and community events) online. You can subscribe to the Revolution Newsletter to get it monthly via email. Top Innovator, Big Data Technologies. Revolution Analytics is the proud recipient of the Top...

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Data Scientist John Myles White used R to compare life expectancy and retirement age in the USA. While male (red) and female (green) life expectancies are rising, average retirement age is going down. What this means for the future of benefit programs like Social Security is the topic of an interesting series of comments on the post.

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In today's social world, it's important to be able to collaborate with others online when working with data, and to be able to easily share your outputs online. Fortunately, the R language and the broad R community provides a number of facilities for collaboration and sharing, which are summarized in Noam Ross's guide to tools for collaboration with R....

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In the sponsored article Data Science: Buyer Beware at Forbes, SAP's Ray Rivera takes a dim view of Data Science. According to Rivera, Data Science is a "management fad" in the mold of Business Process Reengineering, and casts data scentists as self-ordained "gurus" whose mission is to stand between the "ignorant masses" that need access to data and a...

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