Category: Analytics

New Free Online Book by Rob Hyndman on Forecasting using #Rstats

From the creator of some of the most widely used packages for time series in the R programming language comes a brand new book, and its online!

This time the book is free, will be updated and 7 chapters are ready (to read!)

. If you do forecasting professionally, now is the time to suggest your own use cases to be featured as the book gets ready by end- 2012. The book is intended as a replace­ment for Makri­dakis, Wheel­wright and Hyn­d­man (Wiley 1998).

http://otexts.com/fpp/

The book is writ­ten for three audi­ences:

(1) people find­ing them­selves doing fore­cast­ing in busi­ness when they may not have had any for­mal train­ing in the area;

(2) undergraduate stu­dents study­ing busi­ness;

(3) MBA stu­dents doing a fore­cast­ing elec­tive.

The book is dif­fer­ent from other fore­cast­ing text­books in sev­eral ways.

  • It is free and online, mak­ing it acces­si­ble to a wide audience.
  • It is con­tin­u­ously updated. You don’t have to wait until the next edi­tion for errors to be removed or new meth­ods to be dis­cussed. We will update the book frequently.
  • There are dozens of real data exam­ples taken from our own con­sult­ing prac­tice. We have worked with hun­dreds of busi­nesses and orga­ni­za­tions help­ing them with fore­cast­ing issues, and this expe­ri­ence has con­tributed directly to many of the exam­ples given here, as well as guid­ing our gen­eral phi­los­o­phy of forecasting.
  • We empha­sise graph­i­cal meth­ods more than most fore­cast­ers. We use graphs to explore the data, analyse the valid­ity of the mod­els fit­ted and present the fore­cast­ing results.

A print ver­sion and a down­load­able e-version of the book will be avail­able to pur­chase on Ama­zon, but not until a few more chap­ters are written.

Contents

(Ajay-Support the open textbook movement!)

If you’ve found this book helpful, please consider helping to fund free, open and online textbooks. (Donations via PayPal.)

Look for yourself at http://otexts.com/fpp/

 

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

Click to access 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

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:

 

( 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

http://rapache.net/

Jerooen Oom’s

Big Noise on Big Data

Increasingly Big Data is used in writing where Business Analytics was used, and data mining is thrown in as a word just to keep liberal art majors happy that they are reading a scientific article.

Some Big Words I have noticed in my Short life-

Big Data? High Performance Analytics? High Performance Computing ? Cloud Computing? Time Sharing? Data Mining? SEMMA? CRISP-DM? KDD? Business Intelligence? Business Analytics and Optimization? (pick a card and any card)

(or Just Moore’s Law catching up with the analytics)

Some examples-

Replace Big Data with Analytics in these articles and let me know if you can make out much of a difference

  • Big Data on Campus

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/education/edlife/colleges-awakening-to-the-opportunities-of-data-mining.html

  • From the man who famously said BI is dead, is now burying Business Analytics within the new buzzword , SAS CMO Jim Davis

How to transform big data from an obstacle into an asset

http://blogs.sas.com/content/corneroffice/2012/07/22/how-to-transform-big-data-from-an-obstacle-into-an-asset/

(Related- Is big data over hyped? by Jim Davis

http://www.sas.com/knowledge-exchange/business-analytics/featured/is-big-data-over-hyped/index.html )

I am sure by 2015, Jim Davis, NYT and the merry men of analytics will find some other buzzwords to rally the troops. In the meantime, let me throw out the flag and call it Big  .

Latest R Journal

Including juicy stuff on using a cluster of Apple Machines for grid computing , seasonality forecasting (Yet Another Package For Time Series )

But I kind of liked Sumo too-

https://code.google.com/p/sumo/

Sumo is a fully-functional web application template that exposes an authenticated user’s R session within java server pages.

Sumo: An Authenticating Web Application with an Embedded R Session by Timothy T. Bergsma and Michael S. Smith Abstract Sumo is a web application intended as a template for developers. It is distributed as a Java ‘war’ file that deploys automatically when placed in a Servlet container’s ‘webapps’
directory. If a user supplies proper credentials, Sumo creates a session-specific Secure Shell connection to the host and a user-specific R session over that connection. Developers may write dynamic server pages that make use of the persistent R session and user-specific file space.

and for Apple fanboys-

We created the xgrid package (Horton and Anoke, 2012) to provide a simple interface to this distributed computing system. The package facilitates use of an Apple Xgrid for distributed processing of a simulation with many independent repetitions, by simplifying job submission (or grid stuffing) and collation of results. It provides a relatively thin but useful layer between R and Apple’s ‘xgrid’ shell command, where the user constructs input scripts to be run remotely. A similar set of routines, optimized for parallel estimation of JAGS (just another Gibbs sampler) models is available within the runjags package (Denwood, 2010). However, with the exception of runjags, none of the previously mentioned packages support parallel computation over an Apple Xgrid.

Hmm I guess parallel computing enabled by Wifi on mobile phones would be awesome too ! So would be anything using iOS . See the rest of the R Journal at http://journal.r-project.org/current.html

RJournal_2012-1