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...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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, ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert On October 1st, Revolution Analytics opens the 2014 season for sponsoring R user groups. Over the past few months we have seen quite a few new user groups start up and we expect the trend to continue into 2014. We hope that our 2014 sponsorship program will help to sustain ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert I don’t think that most people find reading the articles in the statistical journals to be easy going. In my experience, the going is particularly rough when trying to learn something completely new and I don’t expect it could be any other way. There is ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert At Revolution Analytics our mission is to establish R as the driver for Enterprise level computational frameworks. In part, this means that a data scientist ought to be able to develop an R based application in one context, e.g. her local PC, and then get it ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert I was recently looking through upcoming Coursera offerings and came across the course Coding the Matrix: Linear Algebra through Computer Science Applications taught by Philip Klein from Brown University. This looks like a fine course; but why use Python to teach linear algebra? I suppose this is ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert The world may indeed be awash with data, however, it is not always easy to find a suitable data set when you need one. As the number of people becoming involved with R and data science increases so does the need for interesting data sets for creating ... [Read more...]