There's an interesting discussion thread on LinkedIn going on now on the relative benefits of R versus SAS in the commercial sector. Oleg Okun kicks off the discussion with this question: Did anyone have to justify to a prospect/customer why R is better than SAS? What arguments did you provide? Did your prospect/customer agree...
Posts Tagged ‘ open source ’
The R Programming Wikibook
The R Programming wikibook is an open source community project that "aims to create a cross-disciplinary practical guide to the R programming language." It was launched in June 2011 and is seeking content and contributors. The full call for the R Progr...
Keep an Eye on the emerging Open-Source Analytics Stack
This post is contributed by Revolution Analytics CEO Norman Nie, and cross-posted from the Future of Open Source Forum. A lot of attention has been focused recently on Big Data, and rightly so: Big Data is a Big Deal. (See this LinuxInsider article, Big Data, Big Open Source Tools, for a compehensive overview of...
Plug for RStudio: powerful, free, and easy to use interactive development environment for R
(click for a bigger picture)As a longtime SAS user, one obstacle for me in using R professionally has been figuring out a process for saving and testing code across several work sessions and integrating code composition and execution. There are a coup...
Data Mining with WEKA
There are a number of good open source projects for statistics and data mining, for example the software WEKA developed at the University of Waikato. The description on their website states that: Weka is a collection of machine learning algorithms for data mining tasks. The algorithms can either be applied directly to a dataset...
SAS vs Open Source, ctd
Following up on the story from last week, where SAS CEO Jim Goodnight said he "hadn't noticed" competition from open-source alternatives, open-source BI vendor Pentaho's "Chief Geek" James Dixon responds: What this means is that SAS has moved from the Igorance phase to the Ridicule phase of battling open source, they only have Fighting...
New housedata release 20100923
New Housedata release of 49,914 summary filings from 7897 candidates for the US House 2002-2010.
Open source and money – why paying R developers might not always help the project
This post can be summed up by one two sentences: “We can’t buy love.” “Starting to pay for love could make it disappear” while at the same time “We need money to live and love”. These two conflicting forces, with relation to open source, are the topic of this post. This post is directed...
Richard Stallman talk+Q&A at the useR! 2010 conference (audio files attached)
The audio files of the full talk by Richard Stallman are attached to the end of this post. —————– Videos of all the invited talks of the useR! 2010 conference can be viewed on the R User Group blog —————– Last week I had the honor of attending the talk given by Richard Stallman,...
House Data: 41k finance summaries from 2200 candidates
I’d like to announce a new project by Offensive Politics called House Data, launching today. House Data is a large-scale extract of FEC Form 3 Summary of receipts of disbursements (pdf warning) of every US House campaign from mid-2001 onward. The traditional source for campaign finance summaries is the Candidate Summary File, which is...
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).