by Joseph Rickert For a knitty gritty look at what’s new with R there is no better place to start than Dirk Eddelbuettel’s CRANberries site. Since 2007, the site has been reliably providing near real-time status on CRAN packages. Now, every two hours, CRANberries displays updated information on new R packages, updated R packages and R packages that have...
Blog Archives
2013 was a good year for R User Group Meetings
by Joseph Rickert R user groups are thriving. By our count of events listed on Revolution Analytics' Community Calendar, there were about 441 face-to-face R meetups worldwide in 2013; up 41% from 312 in 2012. The plot below indicates what the activity looks like on a monthly basis. (Download the data and R code behind this chart here.) My...
The R Backpages 2
by Joseph Rickert In this roundup of R-related news: Domino enables data science collaboration; Plotly adds an R graphics gallery; Revolution Analytics R user group sponsorship applications are open; and Quandl adds new data sets. San Francisco startup takes on collaborative Data Science Domino, a San Francisco based startup, is inviting users to sign up to beta test its...
R and Bayesian Statistics
by Joseph Rickert Drew Linzer, the Bayesian statistician who attracted considerable attention last year with his spot-on, R-based forecast of the 2012 presidential election, recently gave a tutorial on Bayesian statistics to the Bay Area useR Group (BARUG). Drew covered quite a bit of ground running R code that showed how to make use of WinBugs, JAGS and Stan,...
Counting the Dead in Syria
by Joseph Rickert This past June, the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), a San Francisco based non-profit organization, released its report: “Updated Statistical Analysis of Documentation of Killings in the Syrian Arab Republic”. The report is grim reading, but it represents the necessary, rational work the needs to be done if the world is to understand the extent...
The R Backpages
by Joseph Rickert As an avid newspaper reader (I still get the print edition of the New York Times delivered every Sunday morning) I have always thought that some of the most interesting news is to be found in the back pages. So, in that spirit here are some things that I thought might be fit to print. Plotly...
Finding R in a Hadoop World
by Joseph Rickert The following is a brief report of all things R encountered in my not quite random, but nevertheless far from determined, walk through the O'Reilly Strata / Hadoop World Conference held this week in NYC. To start off, I had the pleasure of doing a 9:00 AM Monday morning joint tutorial with Antonio Piccolboni, the principal...
NESSIS 2013: The future of sports statistics is here!
by Joseph Rickert We have been following sports statistics regularly on the Revolutions Blog with quite a few sports related posts this year. In one post I did back in April about the Latham R package for baseball statistics I speculated on how baseball was poised to move from Moneyball style predictive analytics to real-time descriptive stats by showing...
The ACM 2013 Mining Big Data Camp and "Un-Conference"
by Joseph Rickert The 2013 Mining Big Data Camp was held last Saturday at Ebay’s Town Hall Conference Center in San Jose. The San Francisco chapter of the ACM has been sponsoring this data mining themed, “un-conference” event since 2009. Attendance, this year was lighter than I remembered in the past, however, the event continues to be a viable...
R and Data Week 2013
by Joseph Rickert Data Week 2013 is being held this week in sunny San Francisco at the Fort Mason conference center overlooking the Bay. Holding a Bay Area R User Group Meeting (BARUG) at Data Week helped to raise the R consciousness among the hip conference crowd attracted by the intoxicating mix of blue skies, big data hype, startups...
Plotly: collaborative, publication-quality graphing. 
