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Interview Jeff Allen Trestle Technology #rstats #rshiny
Here is an interview with Jeff Allen who works with R and the new package Shiny in his technology startup. We featured his RGL Demo in our list of Shiny Demos- here
Ajay- Describe how you started using R. What are some of the benefits you noticed on moving to R?
Jeff- I began using R in an internship while working on my undergraduate degree. I was provided with some unformatted R code and asked to modularize the code then wrap it up into an R package for distribution alongside a publication.
To be honest, as a Computer Science student with training more heavily emphasizing the big high-level languages, R took some getting used to for me. It wasn’t until after I concluded that initial project and began using R to do my own data analysis that I began to realize its potential and value. It was the first scripting language which really made interactive use appealing to me — the experience of exploring a dataset in R was unlike anything (more…)
Shiny 0.3 released . New era for #rstats
Message from Winston Cheng of R Studio.
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Data Visualization for R packages at Github #rstats
I noticed this article sometime back by the most excellent hacker, John Myles White ( author Machine learning for Hackers)
http://www.johnmyleswhite.com/notebook/2012/08/12/the-social-dynamics-of-the-r-core-team/
Professor John Fox, whom we have interviewed here as the creator of R Commander, talked on this at User 2008 http://www.statistik.uni-dortmund.de/useR-2008/slides/Fox.pdf
I also noticed that R Project is stuck on SVN ( yes or no??, comment please) while some part of the rest of the World has moved on to Git. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_%28software%29
Is Git really that good compared to SVN http://stackoverflow.com/questions/871/why-is-git-better-than-subversion
Maybe, I think with 5000 packages and more , R -project needs to have more presence on Github and atleast consider Git for the distributed and international project R is becoming.
Little Book of R For Time Series #rstats
I loved this book. Only 75 pages and very lucidly written and available on Github for free. Nice job by Avril Coghlan a.coghlan@ucc.ie
.Of course My usual suspects for Time Series Readings are -
1) The seminal pdf (2008!!) by a certain Prof Hyndman
http://www.maths.anu.edu.au/~johnm/courses/r/ASC2008/pdf/Rtimeseries-ohp.pdf
2) JSS Paper -Automatic Time Series Forecasting: The forecast
Package for R http://www.jstatsoft.org/v27/i03/paper
3) The CRAN View http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/TimeSeries.html
This is cluttered and getting more and more cluttered. Some help on helping recent converts to R, especially in the field of corporate forecasting or time series for business analytics would really help.
Avril does an awesome job with this curiously named ( 
) booklet at http://a-little-book-of-r-for-time-series.readthedocs.org/en/latest/src/timeseries.html
Interview BigML.com
Here is an interview with Charlie Parker, head of large scale online algorithms at http://bigml.com
Ajay- Describe your own personal background in scientific computing, and how you came to be involved with machine learning, cloud computing and BigML.com
Charlie- I am a machine learning Ph.D. from Oregon State University. Francisco Martin (our founder and CEO), Adam Ashenfelter (the lead developer on the tree algorithm), and myself were all studying machine learning at OSU around the same time. We all went our separate ways after that.
Francisco started Strands and turned it into a 100+ million dollar company building recommender systems. Adam worked for CleverSet, a probabilistic modeling company that was eventually sold to Cisco, I believe. I worked for several years in the research labs at Eastman Kodak on data mining, text analysis, and computer vision.
When Francisco left Strands to start BigML, he brought in Justin Donaldson who is a brilliant visualization guy from Indiana, and an ex-Googler named Jose Ortega who is responsible for most of our data infrastructure. They pulled in Adam and I a few months later. We also have Poul Petersen, a former Strands employee, who manages our herd of servers. He is a wizard and makes everyone else’s life much easier.
Ajay- You use clojure for the back end of BigML.com .Are there any other languages and packages you are considering? What makes clojure such a good fit for cloud computing ?
Charlie- Clojure is a great language because it offers you all of the benefits of Java (extensive libraries, cross-platform compatibility, easy integration with things like Hadoop, etc.) but has the syntactical elegance of a functional language. This makes our code base small and easy to read as well as powerful.
We’ve had occasional issues with speed, but that just means writing the occasional function or library in Java. As we build towards processing data at the Terabyte level, we’re hoping to create a framework that is language-agnostic to some extent. So if we have some great machine learning code in C, for example, we’ll use Clojure to tie everything together, but the code that does the heavy lifting will still be in C. For the API and Web layers, we use Python and Django, and Justin is a huge fan of HaXe for our visualizations.
Ajay- Current support is for Decision Trees. When can we see SVM, K Means Clustering and Logit Regression?
Charlie- Right now we’re focused on perfecting our infrastructure and giving you new ways to put data in the system, but expect to see more algorithms appearing in the next few months. We want to make sure they are as beautiful and easy to use as the trees are. Without giving too much away, the first new thing we will probably introduce is an ensemble method of some sort (such as Boosting or Bagging). Clustering is a little further away but we’ll get there soon!
Ajay- How can we use the BigML.com API using R and Python.
Charlie- We have a public github repo for the language bindings. https://github.com/bigmlcom/io Right now, there there are only bash scripts but that should change very soon. The python bindings should be there in a matter of days, and the R bindings in probably a week or two. Clojure and Java bindings should follow shortly after that. We’ll have a blog post about it each time we release a new language binding. http://blog.bigml.com/
Ajay- How can we predict large numbers of observations using a Model that has been built and pruned (model scoring)?
Charlie- We are in the process of refactoring our backend right now for better support for batch prediction and model evaluation. This is something that is probably only a few weeks away. Keep your eye on our blog for updates!
Ajay- How can we export models built in BigML.com for scoring data locally.
Charlie- This is as simple as a call to our API. https://bigml.com/developers/models The call gives you a JSON object representing the tree that is roughly equivalent to a PMML-style representation.
About-
You can read about Charlie Parker at http://www.linkedin.com/pub/charles-parker/11/85b/4b5 and the rest of the BigML team at
#Rstats gets into Enterprise Cloud Software
Image via Wikipedia
Here is an excellent example of how websites should help rather than hinder new customers take a demo of the software without being overwhelmed by sweet talking marketing guys who dont know the difference between heteroskedasticity, probability, odds and likelihood.
It is made by Zementis (Dr Michael Zeller has been a frequent guest here) and Revolution Analytics is still the best shot in Enterprise software for #Rstats
Now if only Revo could get into the lucrative Department of Energy or Department of Defense business- they could change the world AND earn some more revenue than they have been doing. But seriously.
Check out http://deployr.revolutionanalytics.com/zementis/ and play with it. or better still mash it with some data viz and ROC curves.- or extend it with some APIS
Related articles
- New book on BigData Analytics and Data mining using #Rstats with a GUI (decisionstats.com)
- rstat.us – a rival to Twitter? (i-programmer.info)
- Slides: “Accessing Databases from R” #rstats (r-bloggers.com)
Dataists shake up R community with a rocking contest
Image by Johan Larsson via Flickr
Newly created Dataists are creating waves on Hacker News and beyond with their innovative contest- A Recommendation Engine for R Packages.
Not only is the contest useful, it is likely to teach R Users some data hacking skills, as well as the basics of creating a GitHub Project.
Read more here-http://www.dataists.com/2010/10/using-data-tools-to-find-data-tools-the-yo-dawg-of-data-hacking/
For that reason, we’ve settled on the more manageable question, “which packages are most often installed by normal R users?”
This last question could potentially be answered in a variety of ways. Our current approach uses a convenience sample of installation data that we’ve collected from volunteers in the R community, who kindly agreed to send us a list of the packages they have on their systems. We’ve anonymized this data and compiled a set of metadata-based predictors that allow us to predict the installation probabilities quite well. We’re releasing all of our current work, including the data we have and all of the code we’ve used so far for our exploratory analyses. The contest itself will go live on Kaggle on Sunday and will end four months from Sunday on February 10, 2011. The rules, prizes and official data sets are all described below.
Rules and Prizes
To win the contest, you need to predict the probability that a user U has a package P installed on their system for every pair, (U, P). We’ll assess your performance using ROC methods, which will be evaluated against a held out test data set. The winning team will receive 3 UseR! books of their choosing. In order to win the contest, you’ll have to provide your analysis code to us by creating a fork of our GitHub repository. You’ll also be required to provide a written description of your approach. We’re asking for so much openness from the winning team because we want this contest to serve as a stepping stone for the R community. We’re also hoping that enterprising data hackers will extend the lessons learned through this contest to other programming languages.
Extract from-http://www.dataists.com/2010/10/using-data-tools-to-find-data-tools-the-yo-dawg-of-data-hacking/
Read the full article there
