May 2013 – DECISION STATS

Tatvic bets on R

Tatvic, a up and coming startup founded by an ex-Trilogy colleague, has helped with the R for Google Analytics package. While Tatvic is into heavy duty web analytics, they are betting big on R, and using it for Web Analytics. David Smith, most excellent blogger-de-chief in R universe has blogged on them before here http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2013/02/analyze-web-traffic-data-with-google-analytics-and-r.html

Here is an upcoming seminar on R in Web Analytics.

Click here

From this webinar, you will get to know:

What is R and why should you use this tool? How to extract your Web Analytics data into R?
How to build a predictive model using web analytics data with the help of R?
How predictive modelling can take your analysis to the next level?
How to carry out insightful analysis through visualization?

Who should attend: Every web analyst who wants to take his analysis to the next level.

ps- Hat tip to Caroline A

6 weeks Data Scientist Online Courses #rstats

Hosting a 6 weekend live online certification course on Business Analytics with R starting June 1 at Edureka.Check www.edureka.in/r-for-analytics for more details. Course has been decided to ensure more open data science than current expensive offerings that are tech rather than business oriented but more support and customization than a MOOC This is because many business customers don’t care if it is lapply or ddapply, or command line or GUI, as long as they get good ROI on time and money spent in shifting to R from other analytics software.

R for Business Analytics now in Chinese

Email from Springer to me-

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Dear Dr. Ohri,

Springer SBM is pleased to inform you that we have concluded a contract for the Chinese translation of your book:
R for Business Analytics
Edition Number: 1 (2013)
Mr. A Ohri
978-1-4614-4342-1

We trust you are as enthusiastic about this opportunity to distribute your book as we are.

The publisher of the translation is: Xi’an Jiaotong University Press.

The financial conditions we agreed upon are:
A flat fee of EUR XXXX for 3,000 copies, payable upon conclusion of the agreement but not later than 60 days thereafter. (Please note that this fee is subject to tax deductions of 15.77%, imposed by the licensee’s country.)

Upon receiving the payment, we will ask our accounts department to transfer your shares to you, according to your contract with Springer. The share will then be shown on the next royalty statement you’ll receive.

Upon publication you would receive 4 complimentary copies.

In case you have further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

With best wishes,

XXXXX

Springer
Rights and Permissions

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For the book in English- see right margin!

So many R Packages Everywhere, which one do I use? #rstats

Some thoughts on R Packages

CRAN is no longer the sole repository for many useful R packages. This includes R Forge, Google Code and increasingly Github
CRAN lacks the flexibility and social aspect of Github.
CRAN Views is the only thing that lists subject wide listing of R packages. The categorization is however done more on methods than on use cases or business domains.
Multiple R packages for the same thing. Which one do I use? Only Stack Overflow helps with that. No rating , no recommendation system
The packages suggested by R package feature needs better and automatic association analysis . Right now it is manual and dependent on package author and maintainer.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who guards the guardians of R packages. In an era of cyber security, we need better transparency on security measures within R packages especially given the international nature of the project. I am very sure I ( or anyone) can create R code to communicate discretely especially on Windows
I would rather not install anything on my local machine, and read the package directly from the CRAN . CRAN was designed in an era of low bandwidth- this needs to be upgraded.
Note I am refraining respectfully from the atrocious nature of aesthetics in the home website. Many statisticians feel no use of making R user friendly. My professors at U tenn (from which I dropped out in 2 sems) were horrified when I took courses in graphic design as I wanted to know more on the A and B, which make the A/B testing of statistical design. Now that I am getting older, I get horrified by the lack of HTML, CSS and JQuery by some of the brightest programmers in this project.
Please comment below.

Funny Web Analytics Data

Number of Visitors =1

Number of Views=8

Number of Countries=3

Huh? Teleporting? or Incorrect bucketing in time for visitors?

Matt M-show me the code!!

Using Google Image search for OkCupid Profile Images

Suppose you like some one on OKCupid. Click to navigate to photos.
Click Save as to save the webpage completely. All Images are now in a folder on your laptop
Use Google Image Search Upload to one by one . The biggest privacy drawback, Google Image search doesn’t find Instagram or Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn profile images so well, but does it extremely well for Google Plus Profile Image. Lolcat!
Solution- have two sets of photos that make you look good, one for friends, other for OKCupid or other online dating shenanigans!

I interview Stephen, awesome Face Recognition hacker here, and I think his solution is the best for privacy- use a robots.txt equivalent for images, just as you use it for websites.