Author: Ajay Ohri

http://about.me/ajayohri

The second meetup for R New Delhi Users

The R Users of New Delhi met for the second time on Dec 15, 2012. We meet on the third Saturday of every month.

12121

We talked on epidemiology using epi calc package  ( we have 1 doctor and 1 bio statistician) , and Cloud Computing ( we have two IT guys) and Business Analytics. We also discussed the GUI , R Commander , Rattle, and Deducer for beginners and people transitioning to R from other analytics software. We also discussed the R for SAS and SPSS Users books, and R for Data Mining Book. The free book for R for Epidemiology ( http://cran.r-project.org/doc/contrib/Epicalc_Book.pdf ) was mentioned . Not bad for 1 hour.

We are currently unfunded and unsponsored , I hope to get some sponsors to give away R books to encourage users and group members (excluding my own). The only catch to join this meetup group, you either need to attend (and be local) or present something ( if you are not in Delhi)2

I have been trying to get this group to go from Vector to Matrix to get a bigger sponsorship from Revolution , but I am constrained by meeting in a public cafe. That is due to change since we managed to get one sponsor for meeting place in Noida ( a Business School batchmate who owns his office)

http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/news-events/r-user-group/

Deadlines for applications are:

  • March 31, 2013 for Matrix and Array level groups.
  • September 30, 2013 for Vector level groups.

2013 Sponsorship Levels

The size of the annual grant depends on the size of your group.

Level For groups that are:  Requirements Annual Grant ($USD)
Vector Just getting started A group name, group webpage, and a focus on R. (Here are some tips on starting up a new R user group.) $100
Matrix Smaller but established 3 meetings in last 6 months with 30 attendees or more.  $500
Array Larger and groups  3 meetings in last 6 months with 60 attendees or more. $1000
Related articles

 

WordPress.com changes Analytics

WP.com made a cool change to WP- Stats , its default analytics program, It now counts visitors as well as visits. This is especially useful to writers like me who like to customize content based on analytics ( GA Analytics does not work on WordPress.com hosted sites) and who dont want to bother with hosting /hacking (WP.com is much more hassle free than self-hosted , or even Rackspace hosted in my experience).

Of course the guy DOS-ing my poetry blog (via Yahoo Image Service) needs to use Tor to hide. Unless they dont want to hide and just want to click on my Roses poem 200 times (passing a subliminal message?) . Of course GA Analytics loves line charts and WP Stats loves Bar Charts, but we wont get into that.

Untitled

 

Why Google will never be a monopoly?

1) It takes 5 seconds to switch your Search Engine Provider.

2) It consistently does not lock you with added services of its own (like Youtube runs on Iphones and Facebook and on Internet Explorer and so does the search engine  and so does Google Maps).

3) It has leveraged the maximum from goodwill from open source developers without investing too much money back into them Goodwill is precious and once you lose dev cred you lose it for some time (as some companies found out in the last decade).

4) It has very well funded rivals from MS, Oracle,and Apple and Facebook. That alone will guarantee competition more than any lawyer.

Some Google Strengths-

5) Its  portfolio remains under monetized  – that gives it plenty of flexibility. The following products are the best in class, and yet are mostly free for retail customers.

  •  Youtube
  • Gmail
  • Android
  • Google Maps
  • Chrome
  • Google Analytics
  • Google Docs/Drive

6) Its main product is free to use. You cant beat free. You can try. but cant.

7) It remains the prime source of CS/ Math/Stat related talent on this planet (remember Map Reduce paper). Only the NSA has more bad ass geeks.

8) It tries not to be evil. Mostly it is not evil. Sometimes the ads get irritating. But never evil.

Happy Holidays

Words-adapted from The Bible, book of Ecclesiastes
Music-Pete Seegerhappy-holidays

To Everything (Turn, Turn, Turn)
There is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn)
And a time to every purpose, under Heaven

A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to laugh, a time to weep

To Everything (Turn, Turn, Turn)
There is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn)
And a time to every purpose, under Heaven

A time to build up,a time to break down
A time to dance, a time to mourn
A time to cast away stones, a time to gather stones together

To Everything (Turn, Turn, Turn)
There is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn)
And a time to every purpose, under Heaven

A time of love, a time of hate
A time of war, a time of peace
A time you may embrace, a time to refrain from embracing

To Everything (Turn, Turn, Turn)
There is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn)
And a time to every purpose, under Heaven

A time to gain, a time to lose
A time to rend, a time to sew
A time for love, a time for hate
A time for peace, I swear it’s not too late

Try and learn R – for Free

A free online course on learning R ( sponsored by O Reilly)

http://tryr.codeschool.com/

Table of Contents

  1. R Syntax: A gentle introduction to R expressions, variables, and functions
  2. Vectors: Grouping values into vectors, then doing arithmetic and graphs with them
  3. Matrices: Creating and graphing two-dimensional data sets
  4. Summary Statistics: Calculating and plotting some basic statistics: mean, median, and standard deviation
  5. Factors: Creating and plotting categorized data
  6. Data Frames: Organizing values into data frames, loading frames from files and merging them
  7. Working With Real-World Data: Testing for correlation between data sets, linear models and installing additional packages

codeschool try R

Related articles

 

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.

Interviews and Reviews: More R #rstats

I got interviewed on moving on from Excel to R in Human Resources (HR) here at http://www.hrtecheurope.com/blog/?p=5345

“There is a lot of data out there and it’s stored in different formats. Spreadsheets have their uses but they’re limited in what they can do. The spreadsheet is bad when getting over 5000 or 10000 rows – it slows down. It’s just not designed for that. It was designed for much higher levels of interaction.

In the business world we really don’t need to know every row of data, we need to summarise it, we need to visualise it and put it into a powerpoint to show to colleagues or clients.”

And a more recent interview with my fellow IIML mate, and editor at Analytics India Magazine

http://analyticsindiamag.com/interview-ajay-ohri-author-r-for-business-analytics/

AIM: Which R packages do you use the most and which ones are your favorites?

AO: I use R Commander and Rattle a lot, and I use the dependent packages. I use car for regression, and forecast for time series, and many packages for specific graphs. I have not mastered ggplot though but I do use it sometimes. Overall I am waiting for Hadley Wickham to come up with an updated book to his ecosystem of packages as they are very formidable, completely comprehensive and easy to use in my opinion, so much I can get by the occasional copy and paste code.

 

A surprising review at R- Bloggers.com /Intelligent Trading

http://intelligenttradingtech.blogspot.in/2012/10/book-review-r-for-business-analytics.html

The good news is that many of the large companies do not view R as a threat, but as a beneficial tool to assist their own software capabilities.

After assisting and helping R users navigate through the dense forest of various GUI interface choices (in order to get R up and running), Mr. Ohri continues to handhold users through step by step approaches (with detailed screen captures) to run R from various simple to more advanced platforms (e.g. CLOUD, EC2) in order to gather, explore, and process data, with detailed illustrations on how to use R’s powerful graphing capabilities on the back-end.

Do you want to write a review too? You can visit the site here

http://www.springer.com/statistics/book/978-1-4614-4342-1

Related articles