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New Delhi R User group meets up
Inspired by David Smith ‘s blog post at http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2012/10/r-user-group-sponsorship-applications-open-for-2013.html I set up a meetup group for New Delhi at http://www.meetup.com/New-Delhi-R-UseR-Group/ ( India to my surprise has only 1 R user meetup group before this in Bangalore). The first meeting was awesome, we met in a cafe, and the plan going forward is to cover cross domain learning and collaboration on tools, startups, mashups and training.
Hopefully we can reach out to analytics enthusiasts in Mumbai and Chennai to help kickstart the R User groups. Indian companies like Mu Sigma have been using R more and more in analytics (offshoring). You can even use the sponsorship from Revolution Analytics to start your meetup group , Meetup.com gives you a 50% discount if you pay 6 months in advance, and given Oracle’s and IBM/Google\s big Indian presence I hope they lend a hand to User groups for R in India as well.
JMP Student Edition
I really liked the initiatives at JMP/Academic. Not only they offer the software bundled with a textbook, which is both good common sense as well as business sense given how fast students can get confused
(Rant 1 Bundling with textbooks is something I think is Revolution Analytics should think of doing instead of just offering the academic version for free downloading- it would be interesting to see the penetration of R academic market with Revolution’s version and the open source version with the existing strategy)
From http://www.jmp.com/academic/textbooks.shtml
Major publishers of introductory statistics textbooks offer a 12-month license to JMP Student Edition, a streamlined version of JMP, with their textbooks.
and a glance through this http://www.jmp.com/academic/pdf/jmp_se_comparison.pdf shows it is a credible and not extremely whittled down version which would be just dishonest.
And I loved this Reference Card at http://www.jmp.com/academic/pdf/jmp10_se_quick_guide.pdf
Oracle, SAP- Hana, Revolution Analytics and even SAS/STAT itself can make more reference cards like this- elegant solutions for students and new learners!
More- creative-rants Honestly why do corporate sites use PDFs anymore when they can use Instapaper , or any of these SlideShare/Scribd formats to show information in a better way without diverting the user from the main webpage.
But I digress, back to JMP
Resources for Faculty Using JMP® Student Edition
Faculty who select a JMP Student Edition bundle for their courses may be eligible for additional resources, including course materials and training.
Special JMP® Student Edition for AP Statistics
JMP Student Edition is available in a convenient five-year license for qualified Advanced Placement statistics programs.
Try and have a look yourself at http://www.jmp.com/academic/student.shtml
RevoDeployR and commercial BI using R and R based cloud computing using Open CPU
Revolution Analytics has of course had RevoDeployR, and in a webinar strive to bring it back to center spotlight.
BI is a good lucrative market, and visualization is a strength in R, so it is matter of time before we have more R based BI solutions. I really liked the two slides below for explaining RevoDeployR better to newbies like me (and many others!)
Integrating R into 3rd party and Web applications using RevoDeployR
Please click here to download the PDF.
Here are some additional links that may be of interest to you:
- RevoDeployR web page: http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/products/enterprise-deployment.php
- RevoDeployR data sheet: http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/products/pdf/RevoDeployR.pdf
- RevoDeployR whitepaper: http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/why-revolution-r/whitepapers/DeployR_White_Paper.pdf
( I still think someone should make a commercial version of Jeroen Oom’s web interfaces and Jeff Horner’s web infrastructure (see below) for making customized Business Intelligence (BI) /Data Visualization solutions , UCLA and Vanderbilt are not exactly Stanford when it comes to deploying great academic solutions in the startup-tech world). I kind of think Google or someone at Revolution should atleast dekko OpenCPU as a credible cloud solution in R.
I still cant figure out whether Revolution Analytics has a cloud computing strategy and Google seems to be working mysteriously as usual in broadening access to the Google Compute Cloud to the rest of R Community.
Open CPU provides a free and open platform for statistical computing in the cloud. It is meant as an open, social analysis environment where people can share and run R functions and objects. For more details, visit the websit: www.opencpu.org
and esp see
https://public.opencpu.org/userapps/opencpu/opencpu.demo/runcode/
Jeff Horner’s
Jerooen Oom’s
-
/webapps
- /stockplot
- /lme4
- /ggplot2
- /puberty plot
- /IRT tool
Online Education takes off
Udacity is a smaller player but welcome competition to Coursera. I think companies that have on demand learning programs should consider donating a course to these online education players (like SAS Institute for SAS , Revolution Analytics for R, SAP, Oracle for in-memory analytics etc)
Any takers!
Coursera is doing a superb job with huge number of free courses from notable professors. 111 courses!
I am of course partial to the 7 courses that are related to my field-
Interview Jason Kuo SAP Analytics #Rstats
Here is an interview with Jason Kuo who works with SAP Analytics as Group Solutions Marketing Manager. Jason answers questions on SAP Analytics and it’s increasing involvement with R statistical language.
Ajay- What made you choose R as the language to tie important parts of your technology platform like HANA and SAP Predictive Analysis. Did you consider other languages like Julia or Python.
Jason- It’s the most popular. Over 50% of the statisticians and data analysts use R. With 3,500+ algorithms its arguably the most comprehensive statistical analysis language. That said,we are not closing the door on others.
Ajay- When did you first start getting interested in R as an analytics platform?
Jason- SAP has been tracking R for 5+ years. With R’s explosive growth over the last year or two, it made sense for us to dramatically increase our investment in R.
Ajay- Can we expect SAP to give back to the R community like Google and Revolution Analytics does- by sponsoring Package development or sponsoring user meets and conferences?
Will we see SAP’s R HANA package in this year’s R conference User 2012 in Nashville
Jason- Yes. We plan to provide a specific driver for HANA tables for input of the data to native R. This planned for end of 2012. We’ll then review our event strategy. SAP has been a sponsor of Predictive Analytics World for several years and was indeed a founding sponsor. We may be attending the year’s R conference in Nashville.
Ajay- What has been some of the initial customer feedback to your analytics expansion and offerings.
Jason- We have completed two very successful Pilots of the R Integration for HANA with two of SAP’s largest customers.
About-
Jason has over 15 years of BI and Data Warehousing industry experience. Having worked at Oracle, Business Objects, and now SAP, Jason has been involved in numerous technical marketing roles involving performance management dashboards, information management, text analysis, predictive analytics, and now big data. He has a bachelor’s of science in operations research from the University of Michigan.
Revolution R Enterprise 6.0 launched!
Just got the email-more software is good news!
Revolution R Enterprise 6.0 for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows and 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL 5.x and RHEL 6.x) features an updated release of the RevoScaleR package that provides fast, scalable data management and data analysis: the same code scales from data frames to local, high-performance .xdf files to data distributed across a Windows HPC Server cluster or IBM Platform Computing LSF cluster. RevoScaleR also allows distribution of the execution of essentially any R function across cores and nodes, delivering the results back to the user.
Detailed information on what’s new in 6.0 and known issues:
http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/doc/README_RevoEnt_Windows_6.0.0.pdf
and from the manual-lots of function goodies for Big Data
- IBM Platform LSF Cluster support [Linux only]. The new RevoScaleR function, RxLsfCluster, allows you to create a distributed compute context for the Platform LSF workload manager.
- Azure Burst support added for Microsoft HPC Server [Windows only]. The new RevoScaleR function, RxAzureBurst, allows you to create a distributed compute context to have computations performed in the cloud using Azure Burst
- The rxExec function allows distributed execution of essentially any R function across cores and nodes, delivering the results back to the user.
- functions RxLocalParallel and RxLocalSeq allow you to create compute context objects for local parallel and local sequential computation, respectively.
- RxForeachDoPar allows you to create a compute context using the currently registered foreach parallel backend (doParallel, doSNOW, doMC, etc.). To execute rxExec calls, simply register the parallel backend as usual, then set your compute context as follows: rxSetComputeContext(RxForeachDoPar())
- rxSetComputeContext and rxGetComputeContext simplify management of compute contexts.
- rxGlm, provides a fast, scalable, distributable implementation of generalized linear models. This expands the list of full-featured high performance analytics functions already available: summary statistics (rxSummary), cubes and cross tabs (rxCube,rxCrossTabs), linear models (rxLinMod), covariance and correlation matrices (rxCovCor),
binomial logistic regression (rxLogit), and k-means clustering (rxKmeans)example: a Tweedie family with 1 million observations and 78 estimated coefficients (categorical data)
took 17 seconds with rxGlm compared with 377 seconds for glm on a quadcore laptopand easier working with R’s big brother SAS language
RevoScaleR high-performance analysis functions will now conveniently work directly with a variety of external data sources (delimited and fixed format text files, SAS files, SPSS files, and ODBC data connections). New functions are provided to create data source objects to represent these data sources (RxTextData, RxOdbcData, RxSasData, and RxSpssData), which in turn can be specified for the ‘data’ argument for these RevoScaleR analysis functions: rxHistogram, rxSummary, rxCube, rxCrossTabs, rxLinMod, rxCovCor, rxLogit, and rxGlm.
example,
you can analyze a SAS file directly as follows:
# Create a SAS data source with information about variables and # rows to read in each chunk
sasDataFile <- file.path(rxGetOption(“sampleDataDir”),”claims.sas7bdat”)
sasDS <- RxSasData(sasDataFile, stringsAsFactors = TRUE,colClasses = c(RowNum = “integer”),rowsPerRead = 50)# Compute and draw a histogram directly from the SAS file
rxHistogram( ~cost|type, data = sasDS)
# Compute summary statistics
rxSummary(~., data = sasDS)
# Estimate a linear model
linModObj <- rxLinMod(cost~age + car_age + type, data = sasDS)
summary(linModObj)
# Import a subset into a data frame for further inspection
subData <- rxImport(inData = sasDS, rowSelection = cost > 400,
varsToKeep = c(“cost”, “age”, “type”))
subData
The installation instructions and instructions for getting started with Revolution R Enterprise & RevoDeployR for Windows: http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/downloads/instructions/windows.php
Interview Alvaro Tejada Galindo, SAP Labs Montreal, Using SAP Hana with #Rstats
Here is a brief interview with Alvaro Tejada Galindo aka Blag who is a developer working with SAP Hana and R at SAP Labs, Montreal. SAP Hana is SAP’s latest offering in BI , it’s also a database and a computing environment , and using R and HANA together on the cloud can give major productivity gains in terms of both speed and analytical ability, as per preliminary use cases.
Ajay- What made the R language a fit for SAP HANA. Did you consider other languages? What is your view on Julia/Python/SPSS/SAS/Matlab languages
Blag- I think “R” is a must for SAP HANA. As the fastest database in the market, we needed a language that could help us shape the data in the best possible way. “R” filled that purpose very well. Right now, “R” is not the only language as “L” can be used as well (http://wiki.tcl.tk/17068) …not forgetting “SQLScript” which is our own version of SQL (http://goo.gl/x3bwh) . I have to admit that I tried Julia, but couldn’t manage to make it work. Regarding Python, it’s an interesting question as I’m going to blog about Python and SAP HANA soon. About Matlab, SPSS and SAS I haven’t used them, so I got nothing to say there.
Ajay- What is your view on some of the limitations of R that can be overcome with using it with SAP HANA.
Blag- I think mostly the ability of SAP HANA to work with big data. Again, SAP HANA and “R” can work very nicely together and achieve things that weren’t possible before.
Ajay- Have you considered other vendors of R including working with RStudio, Revolution Analytics, and even Oracle R Enterprise.
Blag- I’m not really part of the SAP HANA or the R groups inside SAP, so I can’t really comment on that. I can only say that I use RStudio every time I need to do something with R. Regarding Oracle…I don’t think so…but they can use any of our products whenever they want.
Ajay- Do you have a case study on an actual usage of R with SAP HANA that led to great results.
Blag- Right now the use of “R” and SAP HANA is very preliminary, I don’t think many people has start working on it…but as an example that it works, you can check this awesome blog entry from my friend Jitender Aswani “Big Data, R and HANA: Analyze 200 Million Data Points and Later Visualize Using Google Maps “ (http://allthingsr.blogspot.com/#!/2012/04/big-data-r-and-hana-analyze-200-million.html)
Ajay- Does your group in SAP plan to give to the R ecosystem by attending conferences like UseR 2012, sponsoring meets, or package development etc
Blag- My group is in charge of everything developers, so sure, we’re planning to get more in touch with R developers and their ecosystem. Not sure how we’re going to deal with it, but at least I’m going to get myself involved in the Montreal R Group.
About-
http://scn.sap.com/people/alvaro.tejadagalindo3
| Name: | Alvaro Tejada Galindo |
| Email: | a.tejada.galindo@sap.com |
| Profession: | Development |
| Company: | SAP Canada Labs-Montreal |
| Town/City: | Montreal |
| Country: | Canada |
| Instant Messaging Type: | |
| Instant Messaging ID: | Blag |
| Personal URL: | http://blagrants.blogspot.com |
| Professional Blog URL: | http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/u/252210910 |
| My Relation to SAP: | employee |
| Short Bio: | Development Expert for the Technology Innovation and Developer Experience team.Used to be an ABAP Consultant for the last 11 years. Addicted to programming since 1997. |
http://www.sap.com/solutions/technology/in-memory-computing-platform/hana/overview/index.epx
and from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP_HANA
SAP HANA is SAP AG’s implementation of in-memory database technology. There are four components within the software group:[1]
- SAP HANA DB (or HANA DB) refers to the database technology itself,
- SAP HANA Studio refers to the suite of tools provided by SAP for modeling,
- SAP HANA Appliance refers to HANA DB as delivered on partner certified hardware (see below) as anappliance. It also includes the modeling tools from HANA Studio as well replication and data transformation tools to move data into HANA DB,[2]
- SAP HANA Application Cloud refers to the cloud based infrastructure for delivery of applications (typically existing SAP applications rewritten to run on HANA).
R is integrated in HANA DB via TCP/IP. HANA uses SQL-SHM, a shared memory-based data exchange to incorporate R’s vertical data structure. HANA also introduces R scripts equivalent to native database operations like join or aggregation.[20] HANA developers can write R scripts in SQL and the types are automatically converted in HANA. R scripts can be invoked with HANA tables as both input and output in the SQLScript. R environments need to be deployed to use R within SQLScript
More blog posts on using SAP and R together
Dealing with R and HANAhttp://scn.sap.com/community/in-memory-business-data-management/blog/2011/11/28/dealing-with-r-and-hana
R meets HANA
http://scn.sap.com/community/in-memory-business-data-management/blog/2012/01/29/r-meets-hana
HANA meets R
http://scn.sap.com/community/in-memory-business-data-management/blog/2012/01/26/hana-meets-r
When SAP HANA met R – First kiss
http://scn.sap.com/community/developer-center/hana/blog/2012/05/21/when-sap-hana-met-r–first-kiss
Using RODBC with SAP HANA DB-
SAP HANA: My experiences on using SAP HANA with R
and of course the blog that started it all-
Jitender Aswani’s http://allthingsr.blogspot.in/
