by Joseph Rickert Learning to effectively use any of the dozens of popular machine learning algorithms requires mastering many details and dealing with all kinds of practical issues. With all of this to consider, it might not be apparent to a person coming to machine learning from a background other ... [Read more...]

by Siddarth Ramesh R Programmer, Revolution Analytics A couple of months ago, I worked on a customer engagement involving Shiny. Shiny is a package created by RStudio that is intended to make plots dynamic and interactive. One advantage of Shiny is that an app would completely be written in R, ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert With a membership that spans the entire Bay Area and the ability to hold meetings from San Jose to San Francisco, the Bay Area useR Group is in the very fortunate position of being able to attract world-class R speakers on a regular basis. Meetings that feature ... [Read more...]

by Norman Matloff You've heard that graphics processing units — GPUs — can bring big increases in computational speed. While GPUs cannot speed up work in every application, the fact is that in many cases it can indeed provide very rapid computation. In this tutorial, we'll see how this is done, both ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert Apache Spark, the open-source, cluster computing framework originally developed in the AMPLab at UC Berkeley and now championed by Databricks is rapidly moving from the bleeding edge of data science to the mainstream. Interest in Spark, demand for training and overall hype is on a trajectory to ... [Read more...]

by Bob Horton, Data Scientist, Revolution Analytics From electronic medical records to genomic sequences, the data deluge is affecting all aspects of health care. The Masters of Science in Health Informatics (MSHI) program at the University of San Francisco, now in its second year, is designed to help students develop ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert One of the greatest strengths of the R language is surely the base graphics capabilities. Grid graphics, lattice, ggplot2, bigvis and the many R packages that interface with javascript D3 graphics have added astounding capabilities, well beyond what can be achieved with base graphics alone. Nevertheless, the ... [Read more...]

by Nick Elprin Co-Founder Domino Data Lab "R Notebooks" use the IPython Notebook UI to run R (rather than Python) in notebook cells, giving you an interactive R environment hosted on scalable servers, accessible through a web browser. This post describes how and why we built our "R Notebooks" feature. ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert KatRisk, a Berkeley based catastrophe modeling company specializing in wind and flood risk, has put three R and Shiny powered interactive demos on their website. Together these provide a nice introduction to the practical aspects of weather based risk modeling and give a good indication of the ... [Read more...]

Cusby Ryan Garner Senior Data Scientist, Revolution Analytics I love creating spatial data visualizations in R. With the ggmap package, I can easily download satellite imagery which serves as a base layer for the data I want to represent. In the code below, I show you how to visualize sampled ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert In a recent post, where I presented some R related highlights of November's H20 World conference, I singled out and described talks by Trevor Hastie and John Chambers and remarked that it would be nice if the videos would be made available. Well, thanks to the generosity ... [Read more...]

by Emilio L. Cano The VI Spanish R Users Conference took place on October 23 and 24 in Santiago de Compostela (Spain). It was a two-day event with a variety of talks and workshops about the R statistical software and programming language and its applications. First of all, let me thank all ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert Revolution Analytics's 2015 R User Group Support Program (RevoRUGS) begins today. Last year we provided financial support to 51 groups worldwide. That works out to be about one third of the total number of R active user groups listed in our Local User Group Directory. R User Groups Supported ... [Read more...]

by Matt Sundquist co-founder of Plotly R, Plotly, and ggplot2 let you make, share, and collaborate on beautiful, interactive plots online. Let's see what we can do with the topographic data from Auckland's Maunga Whau Volcano that comes with R. Copy and paste this R code to make your first ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert The American Statistical Association (ASA) Undergraduate Guidelines Workgroup recently published the report Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Programs in Statistical Science. Although intended for educators setting up or revamping Stats programs at colleges and universities, this concise, 17 page document should be good reading for anyone who wants to ... [Read more...]

by Tammer Kamel Quandl's Founder About 22 months ago I had the privilege of introducing Quandl to the world on this blog. At that time Quandl had about 2 million datasets and a few hundred users. (And we thought that was fabulous.) Now, at the end of 2014, we have some 12 million datasets ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert November was an active and creative month for R user groups with over 50 events listed on the Revolution Analytics' Community Calendar. Here are some highlights that can be found by visiting the websites of a few of the groups that post and share presentations. James Thomson was ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert H2O.ai held its first H2O World conference over two days at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. Although the main purpose of the conference was to promote the company's rich set of Java based machne learning algorithms and announce their new products ... [Read more...]

by Tim Winke PhD student in Demography and Social Sciences in Berlin This post has been abstracted from Tim's entry to a contest that Dalia Research is running based on a global smarthpone survey that they are conducting. Tim's entry post is available as is all of the code behind ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert We usually have a pretty good time at the monthly Bay Area useR Group (BARUG) meetings, but this month's meeting was a bit more of a party than usual. The very well connected PR team at Sqor Sports, our host company for the evening, secured San Francisco's ... [Read more...]