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 Lessons from Large-Scale...
Blog Archives
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...
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...
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 Abstract fame for getting this...
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()), using a 100,000 row...
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...
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:...
R User Groups Continue to Grow
by Joseph Rickert R user groups seem to be sprouting all over. Since last September we have noticed ten new groups worldwide: Auckland, New Zealand: Auckland-R-Users-Group (AKLRUG) had 33 people attend their March 8th meeting Chang Mai Thailand: Chang Mai is the first R user group in Thailand Durban, South Africa: The Durban R User Group is looking forward...
Lots of data != "Big Data"
by Joseph Rickert When talking with data scientists and analysts — who are working with large scale data analytics platforms such as Hadoop — about the best way to do some sophisticated modeling task it is not uncommon for someone to say, "We have all of the data. Why not just use it all?" This sort of comment often...
R’s Garden of Probability Distributions
by Joseph Rickert If you type ?Distributions at the R console you get a list of the 21 probability distributions included in the stats package that ships with base R. The same list appears in the Introduction to R Manual on CRAN and in most of the many fine introductory books available for the R language. These are indeed...
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
