by James Paul Peruvankal, Senior Program Manager at Revolution Analytics Three weeks ago, researchers at Princeton released a study on Epidemiological modeling of online social network dynamics that states Facebook might lose 80% of its users by 2015-2017. Facebook data scientists hilariously debunked the study stating that Princeton itself would lose ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert Recently, I was trying to remember how to make a 3D scatter plot in R when it occurred to me that the documentation on how to do this is scattered all over the place. Hence, this short organizational note that you may find useful. First of all, ... [Read more...]

by Oliver Vagner, Cloud Solutions Lead Architect at Revolution Analytics Today, I am pleased to announce our new offering in the Amazon Web Services Big Data Marketplace – Revolution R Enterprise 7 for AWS. Of course, if you follow this blog, then you are quite familiar with Revolution R Enterprise (RRE) and ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert The weather is on everybody's mind these days: too much ice and snow east of the Rockies and no rain to speak fo in California. Ram Narasimhan has made it a little easier for R users to keep track of what's going on and also get a ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert Revolution Analytics is announcing three new programs today that we hope will be modest but positive contributions to data science education and public service analytics. The first new program, the Academic Institution Program (AIP) enables colleges, universities and other educational institutions to obtain a site license for ... [Read more...]

by Joseph RIckert Last July, I blogged about rxDTree() the RevoScaleR function for building classification and regression trees on very large data sets. As I explaned then, this function is an implementation of the algorithm introduced by Ben-Haim and Yom-Tov in their 2010 paper that builds trees on histograms of data ... [Read more...]

by Daniel Hanson, QA Data Scientist, Revolution Analytics Introduction and Data Setup Last time, we included a couple of examples of plotting a single xts time series using the plot(.) function (ie, said function included in the xts package). Today, we’ll look at some quick and easy methods for ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert Every once in a while a single book comes to crystallize a new discipline. If books still have this power in the era of electronic media, "Doing Data Science, Straight Talk from the Frontline" by Rachel Schutt and Cathy O’Neil: O'Reilly, 2013 might just be the book ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert When I was in graduate school in the mid '70s Mathematics departments were still under the spell of abstraction for its own sake. At that time, Algebraic Topology which uses concepts from Abstract Algebra to study topological spaces was a major gateway to the realm of ... [Read more...]

by Daniel Hanson QA Data Scientist, Revolution Analytics Some Applications of the xts Time Series Package In our previous discussion, we looked at accessing financial data using the quantmod and Quandl R packages. As noted there, the data series returned by quantmod comes in the form of an xts time ... [Read more...]

by Michael Helbraun Michael is member of Revolution Analytics Sales Support team. In the following post, he shows how to synthesize a probability distribution from the opinion of multiple experts: an excellent way to construct a Bayesian prior. There are lots of different ways to forecast. Depending on whether there’... [Read more...]

by Stephen Welle, Senior Support Engineer at Revolution Alalytics and Joseph Rickert For someone trying to learn any new technology getting help with a problem on a public forum can be stressful. Knowing where to go, deciding how to pose a question and figuring out how to deal with a ... [Read more...]

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by Joseph Rickert The Revolution R Enterprise 7.0 Getting started Guide makes a distinction between High Performance Computing (HPC) which is CPU centric, focusing on using many cores to perform lots of processing on small amounts of data, and High Performance Analytics (HPA), data centric computing that concentrates on feeding data ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert At a Bay Area R User Group (BARUG) meeting this month hosted by Cisco, Dag Lohmann (the co-founder of Katrisk) gave an electrifying talk on catastrophe modeling for the insurance industry. Catastrophes: cyclones, hurricanes, floods earthquakes, terrorist attacks are rare events (from a statistical point of view) ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]