A common criticism of R, especially from data scientists who are new to R but proficient in multiple programming languages, is that R is “quirky” and annoying because there is almost always more than one way to do simple things. I usually counter that they are trying to say that R is “flexible” and “rich”, but by the time...
Blog Archives
Benchmarking bigglm
By Joseph Rickert In a recent blog post, David Smith reported on a talk that Steve Yun and I gave at STRATA in NYC about building and benchmarking Poisson GLM models on various platforms. The results presented showed that the rxGlm function from Revolution Analytics’ RevoScaleR package running on a five node cluster outperformed a Map Reduce/ Hadoop implementation...
Simulating the Birthday Problem with data derived probabilities
You've probably heard of the Birthday Paradox: it only takes a small gathering of people before it's quite likely that two of them share the same birthday. You can solve the problem analytically or with simulation, but usually in either case simplifying assumptions are made (no-one born on February 29, for example). Joe Rickert uses Revolution R Enterprise 6...
Simple tools for building a recommendation engine
By Joseph Rickert Revolution’s resident economist, Saar Golde, is very fond of saying that “90% of what you might from a recommendation engine can be achieved with simple techniques”. To illustrate this point (without doing a lot of work), we downloaded the million row movie dataset from www.grouplens.org with the idea of just taking the first obvious exploratory step:...
Coefplot: New Package for Plotting Model Coefficients
By Joseph Rickert Even to the practiced eye, looking at coefficients in R model summaries can be tedious. And, capturing information about the significance of coefficients from scores or maybe even hundreds of models in a way that makes writing the final report a bit easier is a time consuming and thankless task. Of course, once you know what...
Review of ‘R in Action’ by Robert I. Kabacoff
By Joseph Rickert Yesterday, the cosmic randomizer placed me next to a newly minter lawyer in a crowed Los Gatos coffee shop. In three minutes of conversation I learned that that the fellow was interested in corporate law, was about to take a job that would give him a seat in the great VC/start-up game and that he had...
The Bay Area R User Group Meeting on Data Mining with R
By Joseph Rickert Put up a poster that says something like “Data Mining with R” anywhere in the Bay Area and you will surely draw a crowd. But it was still a bit of a surprise that the monthly meeting of the Bay Area R User’s group was so well attended. At one point there were 160 people on...
Review of "The Art of R Programming" by Norman Matloff
By Joseph Rickert Anyone seeking to learn R faces two major challenges: (1) learning how to swim in the sea of information: R packages, books, websites, blog posts, message boards etc. that threatens to drown a newbie and (2) and coming to grips with the structure, syntax and features of the language itself. Having some idea of what one...
ACM Data Mining Camp 2011: Report
(By Joseph Rickert.) In San Jose topics like big data, map reduce, predictive models, mobile analytics and crowdsourcing draw a crowd even on a Saturday. So it turned out that the ACM data Mining Camp and "un-conference" was a very "happening" way to spend a Saturday. Over 500 people attended the event at the Ebay "Town Hall" on North...
Where to find data to use with R
(Contributing blogger Joe Rickert has put together a fantastic list of data sources suitable for use with R. If you're looking for data to use in the Applications of R Contest -- entries close October 31 -- this is a great resource for you -- Ed.) Hardly a day goes by without someone or something reminding me that we...
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
