Salesforce.com has become one of the most successful cloud applications. I am quite astounded by it’s mega hit penetration into myriad of industries.  It is being used by leading organizations not only to implement their customer relationship management system but also to develop their own applications running on ... [Read more...]

In a poll with 570 respondents conducted last month at KDNuggets, the R software was the most frequent response to the question, "What programming languages you used for data mining / data analysis in the past 12 months?". The results are tabled below (respondents could select more than one response): In another poll ... [Read more...]

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The subtitle is: Adversaries in Art, Science and Philosophy. Executive Summary Genius or madness? I haven’t decided. Irreversibility of interpretation The book drives home that once we decide how something is we can’t go back to our state of innocence. Figures 1 through 3 exhibit this idea via a randomly ... [Read more...]

When I received this book, Handbook of fitting statistical distributions with R, by Z. Karian and E.J. Dudewicz,  from/for the Short Book Reviews section of the International Statistical Review, I was obviously impressed by its size (around 1700 pages and 3 kilos…). From briefly glancing at the table of contents, ... [Read more...]

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Today we will be finally creating our long awaited GDP forecast.  In order to create this forecast we have to combine both the forecast from our deterministic trend model and the forecast from our de-trended GDP model. Our model for the trend is:t... [Read more...]

Edward Tufte has written extensively on the presentation of data covering good and bad practice. He has made a number of suggestions for adaptations of regularly used graph types to assist with the interpretation and understanding of data. One idea for enhancing scatter plots covered in Tufte’s book Beautiful ... [Read more...]

I am working on a review paper on microfinance in India and use data from the MIX market. Today, I was amazed by how quick I conjured a map of India with the headquarters of the microfinance institutions that report data to the MIX market depicted on that map. Ideally, ... [Read more...]

A core focus of the RTextTools project has been to make the package as accessible and user-friendly as possible. In its early iterations, the package contained dependencies such as RWeka, openNLP, and [...] [Read more...]

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The source code to rmongodb (home page at http://cnub.org/rmongodb.ashx), a driver to MongoDB for the R language, has been released as open source [Read more...]

Today I worked on a simulation program which require me to create a matrix by repeating the vector n times (both by row and by col). Even the task is extremely simple and only take 1 line to finish(10sec), I have to think about should the argument in rep be ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

Today we wish to see how our model would have faired forecasting the past 20 values of GDP. Why? Well ask yourself this: How can you know where your going, if you don't know where you've been? Once you understand please proceed on with the following post.First recall the trend ... [Read more...]

In my previous post, I was able to build a predictive model (simple linear model) to predict the gross margin % of an eCommerce site based on the promotional spend accross various paid channels.  I repeated the process for AOV (average order ... [Read more...]

I couldn’t contain myself (other more pressing things to do, but…), so I just took a quick time out and a coffee to put together a quick and dirty R function that will let me run queries over Google spreadsheet data sources and essentially treat them as database tables (... [Read more...]

Crazy busy  - no time to blog recently. Time enough for pretty pictures based upon previous words though...(thanks http://www.wordle.net). [Read more...]

I have data on user access to a website. This log file (helpdesk log.csv) just contains the date of access, and how many accesses were counted. It would look like this:Date hits13-07-2011 214-07-2011 116-07-2011 317-07-2011 4...As you can see, for day... [Read more...]

Ref: http://casoilresource.lawr.ucdavis.edu/drupal/book/export/html/23 To add density curve on a histogram, like the green curve above, use code below:#plot the distributionhist(slope, breaks=1000, freq=F, main=main, xlab="Slope Value (percent)", ... [Read more...]