Category: Analytics

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

30cfc91

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 Continue reading “Interview Jeff Allen Trestle Technology #rstats #rshiny”

3rd Meeting for New Delhi R users group #rstats

We continued the 3 rd month without a sponsor for the R User Meetup group. I wish analytics companies in Gurgaon and Mumbai or even Hyderabad can help sponsor R users meetups, as we need to have more knowledge sharing culture here.

I am a bit disappointed by people who RSVP yes, but cancel out without letting us know.

Some additional insights-

1) Never hold meetup on cricket match day

2) location should be very close to Metro Station.

3) Saturdays will be the only meetup day for future. If I am unavailable, Dr Amir will be leading the Meetup.

Some more action points-

1) Ajay and Dr Amir to work together on a blog / site called R for Medical Researchers focused on Indian issues.

2) For Web Application developers, please see shiny package. I have written on the latest version of Shiny- but I would also like you to click on each of the 18 links I have written in this article. Shiny is great for statistically enabling web apps.

https://decisionstats.com/2013/01/26/shiny-0-3-released-new-era-for-rstats/

3) We will be uploading files and creating a slideshare for Delhi R Users. This will be our  digital archive.

4) To start using R immediately use Rattle ( http://rattle.togaware.com/) especially if you build models or need to use data mining

5) To start using R for GIS and Spatial use Deducer with Spatial Plot Builder Plugin
http://www.deducer.org/pmwiki/index.php?n=Main.SpatialPlotBuilder

6) To integrate R with C++ see the RCPP gallery with almost 100 plus packages dependent on it. This will be needed with Developers who are trying to use a faster version of R by using C++ . http://gallery.rcpp.org/

7) Web Analytics using R- is now updated for changes in Google APIs. https://decisionstats.com/2013/01/28/google-analytics-using-rstats-updated/

8) If you are new to programming or Ruby or Python  please go to http://codeacdemy.com .

9) For a beginner in R use http://tryr.codeschool.com

Minutes of Meeting -courtesy Dr Amir

four people (Ajay, myself, Ashish and Nagesh) joined for the 3rd meetup today at around 4 pm at hauz khas village. Ashish and Nagesh are two new members who attended the meetup for the first time. Ashish is in web development with knowledge of python and perl. today he introduced the group about data scraping from web using Perl. Nagesh has a background in management and currently working with insurance company. he is planning to switch to R as it is free. he currently uses SAS. Ajay introduced GUIs like Rattle, Deducer; books (R for business analytics which he himself has authored and others like R for spss and sas users, data mining with r, rattle) and GADM for mapping. I introduced Coursera courses which is currently ongoing and which uses R and also the basics of R like packages, functions and strengths of R.
Ashish has volunteered to find a place for meetup in Green Park near the metro station as we are still struggling to get a decent place for our meetups.
important links:
https://www.coursera.org/course/dataanalysis (coursera course which uses R)
http://www.statmethods.net/index.html  (Quick R site for help)

Also – here is the meetup group for New Delhi R Users

http://www.meetup.com/New-Delhi-R-UseR-Group/

Google Analytics using #Rstats – Updated

Due to changes in Google APIs my earlier post on using Google Analytics in R is deprecated.  Unfortunately it is still on top 10 results for Google results for Using Google Analytics with R.

That post is here https://decisionstats.com/2012/03/20/using-google-analytics-with-r/

A more updated R package on Google Analytics and R is here . https://github.com/skardhamar/rga

A better updated post on an easy to use tutorial on using Google Analytics with R using OAuth 2 playground is here.

http://www.tatvic.com/blog/ga-data-extraction-in-r/

  1. Set the Google analytics query parameters for preparing the request URI
  2. Get the access token from Oauth 2.0 Playground
  3. Retrieve and select the Profile
  4. Retrieving GA data

Note it is excellent for learning to use RJSON method as well. You can see the details on the Tatvic blog above.

Hat tip- Vignesh Prajapati

 

Related articles

 

Shiny 0.3 released . New era for #rstats

Message from Winston Cheng of R Studio.

—-

We’ve released Shiny 0.3.0, and it’s available on CRAN now. Glimmer will be updated with the latest version of Shiny some time later today.
To update your installation of Shiny, run:
  install.packages(‘shiny’)
Highlights of the new version include:
* Some bugs were fixed in `reactivePrint()` and `reactiveText()`, so that they have slightly different rules for collecting the output. Please be aware that some changes to your apps’ text output is possible. The help pages for these functions explain the behavior.
* New `runGitHub()` function, which can run apps directly from a repository on GitHub
* New `runUrl()` function, which can run apps stored as zip or tar files on a remote web server.
* New `isolate()` function, which allows you to access reactive values (from input) without making the function dependent on them.
* Improved scheduling of evaluation of reactive functions, which should reduce the number of “extra” times a reactive function is called.

SAS gets awesome revenues

There are 2.87 billion reasons SAS is not going away anywhere in the Big Data Analytics space. Yes , thats the revenue figures declared by them-http://www.sas.com/news/preleases/2012financials.html

Of course I have always wondered how much they earn from SAS Federal LLC ( which is a subsidary that caters to the lucrative and not very competitive analytics in Intelligence) and their revenue breakdown by Product ( how much did they earn by Base SAS licenses versus how much they earned by Cyber Security  http://www.sas.com/industry/government/cybersecurity/index.html )

I wonder how many other analytics companies have even realized that they can help cut down the federal government costs ( or even have something close to this http://www.sas.com/industry/government/national-security/intelligence-management.html )

This year revenue breakdown was-

The Americas generated 47 percent of SAS’ total revenue; Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) 41 percent; and Asia Pacific 12 percent.

but last year

The Americas accounted for 46 percent of total revenue; Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) 42 percent; and Asia Pacific 12 percent

So Americas revenue grew faster than Europe revenues!Okay

Continue reading “SAS gets awesome revenues”

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.

Continue reading “Data Visualization for R packages at Github #rstats”

Funny Stuff on Book Resellers and Dynamic Pricing at Amazon

I have been keeping an eye on the pricing figure of R for Business Analytics at Amazon.com and have watched it fluctuate between 49$ to 59$ while it is currently at 50$. (Incidentally- Per Capita GDP of India is 3700$ per year or ~$10 per day)

My point is

  1. why should a used book reseller offer to sell the same book at a HIGHER price,
  2. while a new book reseller offers to sell the same book that Amazon is selling (in stock) at a higher price.
  3. On top of that, these resellers have hundreds of thousands of ratings from delighted book buyers (of other books) who were very happy at buying the same book (used or new) at higher prices including upto twice the price.

Funny Stuff , huh!

Continue reading “Funny Stuff on Book Resellers and Dynamic Pricing at Amazon”