Tag: Language

Easter Eggs in #Rstats

Yes.

Cite-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_egg_(media)

A virtual Easter egg is an intentional hidden message, in-joke, or feature in a work such as a computer program, web page, video game, movie, book, or crossword. The term was coined — according to Warren Robinett — by Atari after they were pointed to the secret message left by Robinett in the game Adventure.[1] It draws a parallel with the custom of the Easter egg hunt observed in many Western nations as well as the last Russian imperial family’s tradition of giving elaborately jeweled egg-shaped creations by Carl Fabergé which contained hidden surprises

In R.

Cite-http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7910270/are-there-any-easter-eggs-in-base-r-or-in-major-packages

I like this

just type

example(readLine)

and these two

on 32 bit R type

memory.limit(4096)

and on any version try four question marks

Perhaps the prettiest eggs are the demos in animation package.

But there is magic in asking for help on internal functions in R

Just type-

?.Internal

and you get the sobering thought that you probably are a R Muggle

Call an Internal Function

Description

.Internal performs a call to an internal code which is built in to the R interpreter.

Only true R wizards should even consider using this function, and only R developers can add to the list of internal functions.

Usage

 .Internal(call)

Arguments

call a call expression

See Also

.Primitive, .External (the nearest equivalent available to users).

I liked that I could see the actual internal functions in svn at http://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/src/main/names.c

The opening of the internals document floored me.

It must have been a curious year in 2003-4 when the copyright of R was held (briefly it seems) by the R Foundation and also by the R Development Core Team. (which sounds better?)

*  R : A Computer Language for Statistical Data Analysis
 *  Copyright (C) 1995, 1996  Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka
 *  Copyright (C) 1997--2012  The R Development Core Team
 *  Copyright (C) 2003, 2004  The R Foundation

My contribution

R help discourages for loop

Try ??for or ?for

you go into a loop till you hit escape

If you want more-just write
 .Internal(inspect(ls())) at the end of your  R program.

 

 

 

 

 

 

R for Predictive Modeling- PAW Toronto

A nice workshop on using R for Predictive Modeling by Max Kuhn Director, Nonclinical Statistics, Pfizer is on at PAW Toronto.

Workshop

Monday, April 23, 2012 in Toronto
Full-day: 9:00am – 4:30pm

R for Predictive Modeling:
A Hands-On Introduction

Intended Audience: Practitioners who wish to learn how to execute on predictive analytics by way of the R language; anyone who wants “to turn ideas into software, quickly and faithfully.”

Knowledge Level: Either hands-on experience with predictive modeling (without R) or hands-on familiarity with any programming language (other than R) is sufficient background and preparation to participate in this workshop.

What prior attendees have exclaimed

Workshop Description

This one-day session provides a hands-on introduction to R, the well-known open-source platform for data analysis. Real examples are employed in order to methodically expose attendees to best practices driving R and its rich set of predictive modeling packages, providing hands-on experience and know-how. R is compared to other data analysis platforms, and common pitfalls in using R are addressed.

The instructor, a leading R developer and the creator of CARET, a core R package that streamlines the process for creating predictive models, will guide attendees on hands-on execution with R, covering:

  • A working knowledge of the R system
  • The strengths and limitations of the R language
  • Preparing data with R, including splitting, resampling and variable creation
  • Developing predictive models with R, including decision trees, support vector machines and ensemble methods
  • Visualization: Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA), and tools that persuade
  • Evaluating predictive models, including viewing lift curves, variable importance and avoiding overfitting

Hardware: Bring Your Own Laptop
Each workshop participant is required to bring their own laptop running Windows or OS X. The software used during this training program, R, is free and readily available for download.

Attendees receive an electronic copy of the course materials and related R code at the conclusion of the workshop.

Schedule

  • Workshop starts at 9:00am
  • Morning Coffee Break at 10:30am – 11:00am
  • Lunch provided at 12:30 – 1:15pm
  • Afternoon Coffee Break at 2:30pm – 3:00pm
  • End of the Workshop: 4:30pm

Instructor

Max Kuhn, Director, Nonclinical Statistics, Pfizer

Max Kuhn is a Director of Nonclinical Statistics at Pfizer Global R&D in Connecticut. He has been applying models in the pharmaceutical industries for over 15 years.

He is a leading R developer and the author of several R packages including the CARET package that provides a simple and consistent interface to over 100 predictive models available in R.

Mr. Kuhn has taught courses on modeling within Pfizer and externally, including a class for the India Ministry of Information Technology.

Source-

http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/toronto/2012/r_for_predictive_modeling.php

Teradata updates Teradata-R

The Teradata add-on package for R

teradataR is a package or library that allows R users to easily connect to Teradata, establish data frames (R data formats) to Teradata and to call in-database analytic functions within Teradata.  This allows R users to work within their R console environment while leveraging the in-database functions developed with Teradata Warehouse Miner. This package provides 44 different analytical functions and an additional 20 data connection and R infrastructure functions.  In addition, we’ve added a function that will list the stored procedures within Teradata provide the capability to call functions from R.

  • 20 Functions to enable R infrastructure to operate with Teradata
  • tdConnect – Connect to Teradata via ODBC
  • Td.data.frame – Establish data frame connections to a Teradata table
  • 44 in-database analytical functions callable from R.  Sample of the functions include:
  • Descriptive statistics: Overlap, histogram, frequency, statistics, matrix functions, and values analysis
  • Reorganization functions: join, merge and samples
  • Transformations: bincode, recode, rescale, sigmoid, zscore and null replacement
  • K-Means clustering and Score K-Means
  • Statistical tests: ks, dagostino.pearson, shapiro.wilk, bionomial, and wilcoxon
  • R language features nrow, ncol, min, max, summary, as.dataframe, and dim
  • Tool and R functions that allow users to create their own custom analytic functions that’s callable by R.
  • Teradata Warehouse Miner can capture any analytic stream including UDFs and create a stored procedure
    • Analytic process to create new derived predictive variables can be captured as a stored procedure.
    • Entire process to create or update an analytical data set can be captured as a stored procedure.
    • R function can list all the stored procedures within Teradata.
    • R function can call a stored procedure that runs in-database

TeradataR allows R users to leverage all the benefits of in-database processing with Teradata:

  • Eliminate data movement from Teradata to the R framework for key data intensive tasks.
  • Leverage the speed of Teradata database’s parallel processing to run analytics against big data.
  • Ability to operate within the R console environment.
  • Embed your frequently performed tasks to run in-database.
  • R and TeradataR are free downloads.

Source- http://developer.teradata.com/applications/articles/in-database-analytics-with-teradata-r

This package allows users of R to interact with a Teradata database. R is an open source language for statistical computing and graphics. R provides a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modeling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering) and graphical techniques, and is highly extensible. Users can use many statistical functions directly against the Teradata system without having to extract the data into memory.

Enhancements included with this new 1.0.1 release include:

  • teradataR User Guide
  • addition of Mac OS X Package
  • addition of Red Hat Linux Package (added 2/23/12)
  • summary has been enhanced to run faster
  • JDBC support added to allow Windows or Mac users to run the package with JDBC
  • td.data.frame enhanced to allow support for manipulation to add columns and expressions
  • td.data.frame enhanced to use Teradata 14.0 Fastpath Transform Functions (see Appendix B)
  • td.tapply function added to apply a select group of functions to columns of an array

From-http://downloads.teradata.com/download/applications/teradata-r

and

A new R package for Red Hat Linux has been added to the teradataR 1.0.1 release. This new package provides the same functionality as in the previously released Windows and Mac OS X packages, but is built for Red Hat Linux. This version was built and tested on Red Hat Linux 6.2 32-bit. (The R version for Red Hat Linux is 2.14.1)

Installing this package is the same as any normal R package; just extract it into your R library area, or use the install.packagescommand with the file path.

from- http://developer.teradata.com/tag/r

and

With plenty of prolific and enthusiastic developers, the number of packages for R is expected to grow tremendously. Statisticians and analysts using these packages will find innovative ways to use data to answer their research and business questions. And as organizations become more willing to rely on open-source software for mission-critical tasks, R is poised to become an essential tool for analyzing our complex world.

Source-http://www.teradatamagazine.com/v09n03/Connections/R-you-ready/

From the user guide-

http://downloads.teradata.com/download/applications/teradata-r

teradataR allows R users to easily connect to Teradata, establish td data frames (virtual R data frames) to
Teradata and to call in-database analytic functions within Teradata. This allows R users to work within their R
console environment while leveraging the in-database functions

A Function List
teradataR-package  Allow access to Teradata via R
as.data.frame.td.data.frame Convert td data frame to a data frame
as.td.data.frame Coerce to a td data frame
dim.td.data.frame Dimensions of a td data frame
hist.td.data.frame Histograms
Is.td.data.frame Is an Object a Teradata Data Frame
Is.td.expression Is an Object a Teradata Expression
mean.td.data.frame Arithmetic Mean
median.td.data.frame Median Value
min.td.data.frame Minima
predict.kmeans Kmeans Model Prediction
print.td.data.frame Show contents of a td data frame
sum.td.data.frame Sum of column
summary.td.data.frame Summary of Teradata Data Frame
Td.bincode Create Table of Bincode Values
Td.binomial Binomial Test
Td.binomialsign Binomial Sign Test
Td.call.sp Locate and call stored procedure
Td.cor Correlation Matrix
Td.cov Covariance Matrix
Td.dagostino.pearson D’Agostino Pearson Test
Td.data.frame Teradata Data Frames
Td.f.oneway One way F Test
Td.factanal Factor Analysis
Td.freq Frequency Analysis
Td.hist Histograms
Td.join Join Tables in Teradata
Td.kmeans K-Means Clustering
Td.ks Kolmogorov Smirnov Test
Td.lilliefors Lilliefors Test
Td.merge Merge Rows of Teradata Tables
Td.mode Mode Value of Column
Td.mwnkw Mann-Whitney/Kruskal Wallis Test
Td.nullreplace Replace Null Values
Td.overlap Overlap
Td.quantiles Quantile Values
Td.rank Rank
Td.recode Recode
Td.rescale Rescale Values of Column
Td.sample Sample Rows
Td.shapiro.wilk Shapiro Wilk
Td.sigmoid Sigmoid Transformation
Td.smirnov Smirnov Test
Td.solve Solve a system of equations
Td.stats General Statistics
Td.t.paired T Test Paired
Td.t.unpaired T Test Unpaired
Td.t.unpairedi T Test – Unpaired Indicator
Td.values Values
Td.wilcoxon Wilcoxon Test
Td.zscore Zscore Transformation
tdClose Close connection
tdConnect Connect to Teradata database
tdMetadataDB Set metadata database
tdQuery Query Teradata Database
teradataR Allow access to Teradata via R
[.td.data.frame Extract Teradata Data Frame
[<-.td.data.frame Replace value of Teradata Data Frame

Teradata Analytics

A recent announcement showing Teradata partnering with KXEN and Revolution Analytics for Teradata Analytics.

http://www.teradata.com/News-Releases/2012/Teradata-Expands-Integrated-Analytics-Portfolio/

The Latest in Open Source Emerging Software Technologies
Teradata provides customers with two additional open source technologies – “R” technology from Revolution Analytics for analytics and GeoServer technology for spatial data offered by the OpenGeo organization – both of which are able to leverage the power of Teradata in-database processing for faster, smarter answers to business questions.

In addition to the existing world-class analytic partners, Teradata supports the use of the evolving “R” technology, an open source language for statistical computing and graphics. “R” technology is gaining popularity with data scientists who are exploiting its new and innovative capabilities, which are not readily available. The enhanced “R add-on for Teradata” has a 50 percent performance improvement, it is easier to use, and its capabilities support large data analytics. Users can quickly profile, explore, and analyze larger quantities of data directly in the Teradata Database to deliver faster answers by leveraging embedded analytics.

Teradata has partnered with Revolution Analytics, the leading commercial provider of “R” technology, because of customer interest in high-performing R applications that deliver superior performance for large-scale data. “Our innovative customers understand that big data analytics takes a smart approach to the entire infrastructure and we will enable them to differentiate their business in a cost-effective way,” said David Rich, chief executive officer, Revolution Analytics. “We are excited to partner with Teradata, because we see great affinity between Teradata and Revolution Analytics – we embrace parallel computing and the high performance offered by multi-core and multi-processor hardware.”

and

The Teradata Data Lab empowers business users and leading analytic partners to start building new analytics in less than five minutes, as compared to waiting several weeks for the IT department’s assistance.

“The Data Lab within the Teradata database provides the perfect foundation to enable self-service predictive analytics with KXEN InfiniteInsight,” said John Ball, chief executive officer, KXEN. “Teradata technologies, combined with KXEN’s automated modeling capabilities and in-database scoring, put the power of predictive analytics and data mining directly into the hands of business users. This powerful combination helps our joint customers accelerate insight by delivering top-quality models in orders of magnitude faster than traditional approaches.”

Read more at

http://www.sacbee.com/2012/03/06/4315500/teradata-expands-integrated-analytics.html

Cloud Computing – can be evil

Cloud Computing can be evil because-

1) Most browsers are owned by for profit corporations . Corporations can be evil, sometimes

And corporations can go bankrupt. You can back up data locally, but try backing up a corporation.

2) The content on your web page can be changed using translator extensions . This has interesting ramifications as in George Orwell. You may not be even aware of subtle changes introduced in your browser in the way it renders the html or some words using keywords from a browser extension app.

Imagine a new form of language called Politically Correct Truthspeak, and that can be in English but using machine learning learn to substitute politically sensitive words with Govt sanctioned words.

3) Your DNS and IP settings can be redirected using extensions. This means if a Govt passes a law- you can be denied the websites using just the browser not even the ISP.

Thats an extreme scenario for a authoritative govt creating its own version of Mafiaafire Redirector.

So how to keep the cloud computer honest?Move some stuff to the desktop

How to keep desktop computing efficient?Use some more cloud computing

It is not an OR but an AND function in which some computing can be local, some shared and some in the cloud.

Si?

Interview Michal Kosinski , Concerto Web Based App using #Rstats

Here is an interview with Michal Kosinski , leader of the team that has created Concerto – a web based application using R. What is Concerto? As per http://www.psychometrics.cam.ac.uk/page/300/concerto-testing-platform.htm

Concerto is a web based, adaptive testing platform for creating and running rich, dynamic tests. It combines the flexibility of HTML presentation with the computing power of the R language, and the safety and performance of the MySQL database. It’s totally free for commercial and academic use, and it’s open source

Ajay-  Describe your career in science from high school to this point. What are the various stats platforms you have trained on- and what do you think about their comparative advantages and disadvantages?  

Michal- I started with maths, but quickly realized that I prefer social sciences – thus after one year, I switched to a psychology major and obtained my MSc in Social Psychology with a specialization in Consumer Behaviour. At that time I was mostly using SPSS – as it was the only statistical package that was taught to students in my department. Also, it was not too bad for small samples and the rather basic analyses I was performing at that time.

 

My more recent research performed during my Mphil course in Psychometrics at Cambridge University followed by my current PhD project in social networks and research work at Microsoft Research, requires significantly more powerful tools. Initially, I tried to squeeze as much as possible from SPSS/PASW by mastering the syntax language. SPSS was all I knew, though I reached its limits pretty quickly and was forced to switch to R. It was a pretty dreary experience at the start, switching from an unwieldy but familiar environment into an unwelcoming command line interface, but I’ve quickly realized how empowering and convenient this tool was.

 

I believe that a course in R should be obligatory for all students that are likely to come close to any data analysis in their careers. It is really empowering – once you got the basics you have the potential to use virtually any method there is, and automate most tasks related to analysing and processing data. It is also free and open-source – so you can use it wherever you work. Finally, it enables you to quickly and seamlessly migrate to other powerful environments such as Matlab, C, or Python.

Ajay- What was the motivation behind building Concerto?

Michal- We deal with a lot of online projects at the Psychometrics Centre – one of them attracted more than 7 million unique participants. We needed a powerful tool that would allow researchers and practitioners to conveniently build and deliver online tests.

Also, our relationships with the website designers and software engineers that worked on developing our tests were rather difficult. We had trouble successfully explaining our needs, each little change was implemented with a delay and at significant cost. Not to mention the difficulties with embedding some more advanced methods (such as adaptive testing) in our tests.

So we created a tool allowing us, psychometricians, to easily develop psychometric tests from scratch an publish them online. And all this without having to hire software developers.

Ajay -Why did you choose R as the background for Concerto? What other languages and platforms did you consider. Apart from Concerto, how else do you utilize R in your center, department and University?

Michal- R was a natural choice as it is open-source, free, and nicely integrates with a server environment. Also, we believe that it is becoming a universal statistical and data processing language in science. We put increasing emphasis on teaching R to our students and we hope that it will replace SPSS/PASW as a default statistical tool for social scientists.

Ajay -What all can Concerto do besides a computer adaptive test?

Michal- We did not plan it initially, but Concerto turned out to be extremely flexible. In a nutshell, it is a web interface to R engine with a built-in MySQL database and easy-to-use developer panel. It can be installed on both Windows and Unix systems and used over the network or locally.

Effectively, it can be used to build any kind of web application that requires a powerful and quickly deployable statistical engine. For instance, I envision an easy to use website (that could look a bit like SPSS) allowing students to analyse their data using a web browser alone (learning the underlying R code simultaneously). Also, the authors of R libraries (or anyone else) could use Concerto to build user-friendly web interfaces to their methods.

Finally, Concerto can be conveniently used to build simple non-adaptive tests and questionnaires. It might seem to be slightly less intuitive at first than popular questionnaire services (such us my favourite Survey Monkey), but has virtually unlimited flexibility when it comes to item format, test flow, feedback options, etc. Also, it’s free.

Ajay- How do you see the cloud computing paradigm growing? Do you think browser based computation is here to stay?

Michal – I believe that cloud infrastructure is the future. Dynamically sharing computational and network resources between online service providers has a great competitive advantage over traditional strategies to deal with network infrastructure. I am sure the security concerns will be resolved soon, finishing the transformation of the network infrastructure as we know it. On the other hand, however, I do not see a reason why client-side (or browser) processing of the information should cease to exist – I rather think that the border between the cloud and personal or local computer will continually dissolve.

About

Michal Kosinski is Director of Operations for The Psychometrics Centre and Leader of the e-Psychometrics Unit. He is also a research advisor to the Online Services and Advertising group at the Microsoft Research Cambridge, and a visiting lecturer at the Department of Mathematics in the University of Namur, Belgium. You can read more about him at http://www.michalkosinski.com/

You can read more about Concerto at http://code.google.com/p/concerto-platform/ and http://www.psychometrics.cam.ac.uk/page/300/concerto-testing-platform.htm

Predictive Models Ain’t Easy to Deploy

 

This is a guest blog post by Carole Ann Matignon of Sparkling Logic. You can see more on Sparkling Logic at http://my.sparklinglogic.com/

Decision Management is about combining predictive models and business rules to automate decisions for your business. Insurance underwriting, loan origination or workout, claims processing are all very good use cases for that discipline… But there is a hiccup… It ain’t as easy you would expect…

What’s easy?

If you have a neat model, then most tools would allow you to export it as a PMML model – PMML stands for Predictive Model Markup Language and is a standard XML representation for predictive model formulas. Many model development tools let you export it without much effort. Many BRMS – Business rules Management Systems – let you import it. Tada… The model is ready for deployment.

What’s hard?

The problem that we keep seeing over and over in the industry is the issue around variables.

Those neat predictive models are formulas based on variables that may or may not exist as is in your object model. When the variable is itself a formula based on the object model, like the min, max or sum of Dollar amount spent in Groceries in the past 3 months, and the object model comes with transaction details, such that you can compute it by iterating through those transactions, then the problem is not “that” big. PMML 4 introduced some support for those variables.

The issue that is not easy to fix, and yet quite frequent, is when the model development data model does not resemble the operational one. Your Data Warehouse very likely flattened the object model, and pre-computed some aggregations that make the mapping very hard to restore.

It is clearly not an impossible project as many organizations do that today. It comes with a significant overhead though that forces modelers to involve IT resources to extract the right data for the model to be operationalized. It is a heavy process that is well justified for heavy-duty models that were developed over a period of time, with a significant ROI.

This is a show-stopper though for other initiatives which do not have the same ROI, or would require too frequent model refresh to be viable. Here, I refer to “real” model refresh that involves a model reengineering, not just a re-weighting of the same variables.

For those initiatives where time is of the essence, the challenge will be to bring closer those two worlds, the modelers and the business rules experts, in order to streamline the development AND deployment of analytics beyond the model formula. The great opportunity I see is the potential for a better and coordinated tuning of the cut-off rules in the context of the model refinement. In other words: the opportunity to refine the strategy as a whole. Very ambitious? I don’t think so.

About Carole Ann Matignon

http://my.sparklinglogic.com/index.php/company/management-team

Carole-Ann Matignon Print E-mail

Carole-Ann MatignonCarole-Ann Matignon – Co-Founder, President & Chief Executive Officer

She is a renowned guru in the Decision Management space. She created the vision for Decision Management that is widely adopted now in the industry.  Her claim to fame is managing the strategy and direction of Blaze Advisor, the leading BRMS product, while she also managed all the Decision Management tools at FICO (business rules, predictive analytics and optimization). She has a vision for Decision Management both as a technology and a discipline that can revolutionize the way corporations do business, and will never get tired of painting that vision for her audience.  She speaks often at Industry conferences and has conducted university classes in France and Washington DC.

She started her career building advanced systems using all kinds of technologies — expert systems, rules, optimization, dashboarding and cubes, web search, and beta version of database replication. At Cleversys (acquired by Kurt Salmon & Associates), she also conducted strategic consulting gigs around change management.

While playing with advanced software components, she found a passion for technology and joined ILOG (acquired by IBM). She developed a growing interest in Optimization as well as Business Rules. At ILOG, she coined the term BRMS while brainstorming with her Sales counterpart. She led the Presales organization for Telecom in the Americas up until 2000 when she joined Blaze Software (acquired by Brokat Technologies, HNC Software and finally FICO).

Her 360-degree experience allowed her to gain appreciation for all aspects of a software company, giving her a unique perspective on the business. Her technical background kept her very much in touch with technology as she advanced.