Tag: R

KDNuggets Poll on SAS: Churn in Analytics Users

Here are the some surprising results from the Bible of all Data Miners , KDNuggets.com with some interesting comments about SAS being the Microsoft of analytics.

I believe technically advanced users will probably want to try out R before going in for a commercial license from Revolution Analytics as it is free to try out. Also WPS offers a one month free preview for its software- the latest release of it competes with SAS/Stat and SAS/Access, SAS/Graph and Base SAS- so anyone having these installations on a server would be interested to atleast test it for free. Also WPS would be interested in increasing engines (like they have for Oracle and Teradata).

One very crucial difference for SAS is it’s ability to pull in data from almost all data formats- so if you are using SAS/Connect to remote submit code- then you may not be able to switch soon.

Also the more license heavy customers are not the kind of cutomers who have lots of data in their local desktops but is usually pulled and then crunched before analysed. R has recently made some strides with the RevoScaler package from Revolution Analytics but it’s effectiveness would be tested and tried in the coming months- it seems like a great step in the right direction.

For SAS, the feedback should be a call to improve their product bundling – some of which can feel like over selling at times- but they have been fighting off challenges since past 4 decades and have the pockets and intention to sustain market share battles including discounts ( for repeat customers SAS can be much cheaper than say a first time user of WPS or R)

http://teamwpc.co.uk/home

This really should come as a surprise to some people. You can see the comments on WPS and R at the site itself. Interesting stufff and we can see after say 1 year to see how many actually DID switch.

http://www.kdnuggets.com/polls/2010/switching-from-sas-to-wps.html

IPSUR – A Free R Textbook

Here is a free R textbook called IPSUR-

http://ipsur.r-forge.r-project.org/book/index.php

IPSUR stands for Introduction to Probability and Statistics Using R, ISBN: 978-0-557-24979-4, which is a textbook written for an undergraduate course in probability and statistics. The approximate prerequisites are two or three semesters of calculus and some linear algebra in a few places. Attendees of the class include mathematics, engineering, and computer science majors.

IPSUR is FREE, in the GNU sense of the word. Hard copies are available for purchase here from Lulu and will be available (coming soon) from the other standard online retailers worldwide. The price of the book is exactly the manufacturing cost plus the retailers’ markup. You may be able to get it even cheaper by downloading an electronic copy and printing it yourself, but if you elect this route then be sure to get the publisher-quality PDF from theDownloads page. And double check the price. It was cheaper for my students to buy a perfect-bound paperback from Lulu and have it shipped to their door than it was to upload the PDF to Fed-Ex Kinkos and Xerox a coil-bound copy (and on top of that go pick it up at the store).

If you are going to buy from anywhere other than Lulu then be sure to check the time-stamp on the copyright page. There is a 6 to 8 week delay from Lulu to Amazon and you may not be getting the absolute latest version available.

Refer to the Installation page for instructions to install an electronic copy of IPSUR on your personal computer. See the Feedback page for guidance about questions or comments you may have about IPSUR.

Also see http://ipsur.r-forge.r-project.org/rcmdrplugin/index.php for the R Cmdr Plugin

This plugin for the R Commander accompanies the text Introduction to Probability and Statistics Using R by G. Jay Kerns. The plugin contributes functions unique to the book as well as specific configuration and functionality to R Commander, the pioneering work by John Fox of McMaster University.

RcmdrPlugin.IPSUR’s primary goal is to provide a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) to the open-source and freely available R statistical computing environment. RcmdrPlugin.IPSUR is equipped to handle many of the statistical analyses and graphical displays usually encountered by upper division undergraduate mathematics, statistics, and engineering majors. Available features are comparable to many expensive commercial packages such as Minitab, SPSS, and JMP-IN.

Since the audience of RcmdrPlugin.IPSUR is slightly different than Rcmdr’s, certain functionality has been added and selected error-checks have been disabled to permit the student to explore alternative regions of the statistical landscape. The resulting benefit of increased flexibility is balanced by somewhat increased vulnerability to syntax errors and misuse; the instructor should keep this and the academic audience in mind when usingRcmdrPlugin.IPSUR in the classroom

Q&A with David Smith, Revolution Analytics.

Here’s a group of questions and answers that David Smith of Revolution Analytics was kind enough to answer post the launch of the new R Package which integrates Hadoop and R-                         RevoScaleR

Ajay- How does RevoScaleR work from a technical viewpoint in terms of Hadoop integration?

David-The point isn’t that there’s a deep technical integration between Revolution R and Hadoop, rather that we see them as complementary (not competing) technologies. Hadoop is amazing at reliably (if slowly) processing huge volumes of distributed data; the RevoScaleR package complements Hadoop by providing statistical algorithms to analyze the data processed by Hadoop. The analogy I use is to compare a freight train with a race car: use Hadoop to slog through a distributed data set and use Map/Reduce to output an aggregated, rectangular data file; then use RevoScaleR to perform statistical analysis on the processed data (and use the speed of RevolScaleR to iterate through many model options to find the best one).

Ajay- How is it different from MapReduce and R Hipe– existing R Hadoop packages?
David- They’re complementary. In fact, we’ll be publishing a white paper soon by Saptarshi Guha, author of the Rhipe R/Hadoop integration, showing how he uses Hadoop to process vast volumes of packet-level VOIP data to identify call time/duration from the packets, and then do a regression on the table of calls using RevoScaleR. There’s a little more detail in this blog post: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2010/08/announcing-big-data-for-revolution-r.html
Ajay- Is it going to be proprietary, free or licensable (open source)?
David- RevoScaleR is a proprietary package, available to paid subscribers (or free to academics) with Revolution R Enterprise. (If you haven’t seen it, you might be interested in this Q&A I did with Matt Shotwell: http://biostatmatt.com/archives/533 )
Ajay- Any existing client case studies for Terabyte level analysis using R.
David- The VOIP example above gets close, but most of the case studies we’ve seen in beta testing have been in the 10’s to 100’s of Gb range. We’ve tested RevoScaleR on larger data sets internally, but we’re eager to hear about real-life use cases in the terabyte range.
Ajay- How can I use RevoScaleR on my dual chip Win Intel laptop for say 5 gb of data.
David- One of the great things about RevoScaleR is that it’s designed to work on commodity hardware like a dual-core laptop. You won’t be constrained by the limited RAM available, and the parallel processing algorithms will make use of all cores available to speed up the analysis even further. There’s an example in this white paper (http://info.revolutionanalytics.com/bigdata.html) of doing linear regression on 13Gb of data on a simple dual-core laptop in less than 5 seconds.
AJ-Thanks to David Smith, for this fast response and wishing him, Saptarshi Guha Dr Norman Nie and the rest of guys at Revolution Analytics a congratulations for this new product launch.

Big Data and R: New Product Release by Revolution Analytics

Press Release by the Guys in Revolution Analytics- this time claiming to enable terabyte level analytics with R. Interesting stuff but techie details are awaited.

Revolution Analytics Brings

Big Data Analysis to R

The world’s most powerful statistics language can now tackle terabyte-class data sets using

Revolution R Enterprise—at a fraction of the cost of legacy analytics products


JSM 2010 – VANCOUVER (August 3, 2010) — Revolution Analytics today introduced ‘Big Data’ analysis to its Revolution R Enterprise software, taking the popular R statistics language to unprecedented new levels of capacity and performance for analyzing very large data sets. For the first time, R users will be able to process, visualize and model terabyte-class data sets in a fraction of the time of legacy products—without employing expensive or specialized hardware.

The new version of Revolution R Enterprise introduces an add-on package called RevoScaleR that provides a new framework for fast and efficient multi-core processing of large data sets. It includes:

  • The XDF file format, a new binary ‘Big Data’ file format with an interface to the R language that provides high-speed access to arbitrary rows, blocks and columns of data.
  • A collection of widely-used statistical algorithms optimized for Big Data, including high-performance implementations of Summary Statistics, Linear Regression, Binomial Logistic Regressionand Crosstabs—with more to be added in the near future.
  • Data Reading & Transformation tools that allow users to interactively explore and prepare large data sets for analysis.
  • Extensibility, expert R users can develop and extend their own statistical algorithms to take advantage of Revolution R Enterprise’s new speed and scalability capabilities.

“The R language’s inherent power and extensibility has driven its explosive adoption as the modern system for predictive analytics,” said Norman H. Nie, president and CEO of Revolution Analytics. “We believe that this new Big Data scalability will help R transition from an amazing research and prototyping tool to a production-ready platform for enterprise applications such as quantitative finance and risk management, social media, bioinformatics and telecommunications data analysis.”

Sage Bionetworks is the nonprofit force behind the open-source collaborative effort, Sage Commons, a place where data and disease models can be shared by scientists to better understand disease biology. David Henderson, Director of Scientific Computing at Sage, commented: “At Sage Bionetworks, we need to analyze genomic databases hundreds of gigabytes in size with R. We’re looking forward to using the high-speed data-analysis features of RevoScaleR to dramatically reduce the times it takes us to process these data sets.”

Take Hadoop and Other Big Data Sources to the Next Level

Revolution R Enterprise fits well within the modern ‘Big Data’ architecture by leveraging popular sources such as Hadoop, NoSQL or key value databases, relational databases and data warehouses. These products can be used to store, regularize and do basic manipulation on very large datasets—while Revolution R Enterprise now provides advanced analytics at unparalleled speed and scale: producing speed on speed.

“Together, Hadoop and R can store and analyze massive, complex data,” said Saptarshi Guha, developer of the popular RHIPE R package that integrates the Hadoop framework with R in an automatically distributed computing environment. “Employing the new capabilities of Revolution R Enterprise, we will be able to go even further and compute Big Data regressions and more.”

Platforms and Availability

The new RevoScaleR package will be delivered as part of Revolution R Enterprise 4.0, which will be available for 32-and 64-bit Microsoft Windows in the next 30 days. Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL 5) is planned for later this year.

On its website (http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/bigdata), Revolution Analytics has published performance and scalability benchmarks for Revolution R Enterprise analyzing a 13.2 gigabyte data set of commercial airline information containing more than 123 million rows, and 29 columns.

Additionally, the company will showcase its new Big Data solution in a free webinar on August 25 at 9:00 a.m. Pacific.

Additional Resources

•      Big Data Benchmark whitepaper

•      The Revolution Analytics Roadmap whitepaper

•      Revolutions Blog

•      Download free academic copy of Revolution R Enterprise

•      Visit Inside-R.org for the most comprehensive set of information on R

•      Spread the word: Add a “Download R!” badge on your website

•      Follow @RevolutionR on Twitter

About Revolution Analytics

Revolution Analytics (http://www.revolutionanalytics.com) is the leading commercial provider of software and support for the popular open source R statistics language. Its Revolution R products help make predictive analytics accessible to every type of user and budget. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif. and backed by North Bridge Venture Partners and Intel Capital.

Media Contact

Chantal Yang
Page One PR, for Revolution Analytics
Tel: +1 415-875-7494

Email:  revolution@pageonepr.com

R Oracle Data Mining

Here is a new package called R ODM and it is an interface to do Data Mining via Oracle Tables through R. You can read more here http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/options/odm/odm-r-integration-089013.html and here http://cran.fhcrc.org/web/packages/RODM/RODM.pdf . Also there is a contest for creative use of R and ODM.

R Interface to Oracle Data Mining

The R Interface to Oracle Data Mining ( R-ODM) allows R users to access the power of Oracle Data Mining’s in-database functions using the familiar R syntax. R-ODM provides a powerful environment for prototyping data analysis and data mining methodologies.

R-ODM is especially useful for:

  • Quick prototyping of vertical or domain-based applications where the Oracle Database supports the application
  • Scripting of “production” data mining methodologies
  • Customizing graphics of ODM data mining results (examples: classification, regression, anomaly detection)

The R-ODM interface allows R users to mine data using Oracle Data Mining from the R programming environment. It consists of a set of function wrappers written in source R language that pass data and parameters from the R environment to the Oracle RDBMS enterprise edition as standard user PL/SQL queries via an ODBC interface. The R-ODM interface code is a thin layer of logic and SQL that calls through an ODBC interface. R-ODM does not use or expose any Oracle product code as it is completely an external interface and not part of any Oracle product. R-ODM is similar to the example scripts (e.g., the PL/SQL demo code) that illustrates the use of Oracle Data Mining, for example, how to create Data Mining models, pass arguments, retrieve results etc.

R-ODM is packaged as a standard R source package and is distributed freely as part of the R environment’s Comprehensive R Archive Network ( CRAN). For information about the R environment, R packages and CRAN, see www.r-project.org.

and

Present and win an Apple iPod Touch!
The BI, Warehousing and Analytics (BIWA) SIG is giving an Apple iPOD Touch to the best new presenter. Be part of the TechCast series and get a chance to win!

Consider highlighting a creative use of R and ODM.

BIWA invites all Oracle professionals (experts, end users, managers, DBAs, developers, data analysts, ISVs, partners, etc.) to submit abstracts for 45 minute technical webcasts to our Oracle BIWA (IOUG SIG) Community in our Wednesday TechCast series. Note that the contest is limited to new presenters to encourage fresh participation by the BIWA community.

Also an interview with Oracle Data Mining head, Charlie Berger https://decisionstats.wordpress.com/2009/09/02/oracle/

Business Analytics Analyst Relations /Ethics/White Papers

Curt Monash, whom I respect and have tried to interview (unsuccessfully) points out suitable ethical dilemmas and gray areas in Analyst Relations in Business Intelligence here at http://www.dbms2.com/2010/07/30/advice-for-some-non-clients/

If you dont know what Analyst Relations are, well it’s like credit rating agencies for BI software. Read Curt and his landscaping of the field here ( I am quoting a summary) at http://www.strategicmessaging.com/the-ethics-of-white-papers/2010/08/01/

Vendors typically pay for

  1. They want to connect with sales prospects.
  2. They want general endorsement from the analyst.
  3. They specifically want endorsement from the analyst for their marketing claims.
  4. They want the analyst to do a better job of explaining something than they think they could do themselves.
  5. They want to give the analyst some money to enhance the relationship,

Merv Adrian (I interviewed Merv here at http://www.dudeofdata.com/?p=2505) has responded well here at http://www.enterpriseirregulars.com/23040/white-paper-sponsorship-and-labeling/

None of the sites I checked clearly identify the work as having been sponsored in any way I found obvious in my (admittefly) quick scan. So this is an issue, but it’s not confined to Oracle.

My 2 cents (not being so well paid 😉 are-

I think Curt was calling out Oracle (which didnt respond) and not Merv ( whose subsequent blog post does much to clarify).

As a comparative new /younger blogger in this field,
I applaud both Curt to try and bell the cat ( or point out what everyone in AR winks at) and for Merv for standing by him.

In the long run, it would strengthen analyst relations as a channel if they separate financial payment of content from bias. An example is credit rating agencies who forgot to do so in BFSI and see what happened.

Customers invest millions of dollars in BI systems trusting marketing collateral/white papers/webinars/tests etc. Perhaps it’s time for an industry association for analysts so that individual analysts don’t knuckle down under vendor pressure.

It is easier for someone of Curt, Merv’s stature to declare editing policy and disclosures before they write a white paper.It is much harder for everyone else who is not so well established.

White papers can take as much as 25,000$ to produce- and I know people who in Business Analytics (as opposed to Business Intelligence) slog on cents per hour cranking books on R, SAS , webinars, trainings but there are almost no white papers in BA. Are there any analytics independent analysts who are not biased by R or SAS or SPSS or etc etc. I am not sure but this looks like a good line to  pursue 😉 – provided ethical checks and balances are established.

Personally I know of many so called analytics communities go all out to please their sponsors so bias in writing does exist (you cant praise SAS on a R Blogging Forum or R USers Meet and you cant write on WPS at SAS Community.org )

– at the same time someone once told me- It is tough to make a living as a writer, and that choice between easy money and credible writing needs to be respected.

Most sponsored white papers I read are pure advertisements, directed at CEOs rather than the techie community at large.

Almost every BI vendor claims to have the fastest database with 5X speed- and benchmarking in technical terms could be something they could do too.

Just like Gadget sites benchmark products, you can not benchmark BI or even BA products as it is written not to do so  in many licensing terms.

Probably that is the reason Billions are spent in BI and the positive claims are doubtful ( except by the sellers). Similarly in Analytics, many vendors would have difficulty justifying their claims or prices if they are subjected to a side by side comparison. Unfortunately the resulting confusion results in shoddy technology coming stronger due to more aggressive marketing.

Hadley's tutorials on R Visualization

Here are a set of extremely nice tutorials from Hadley Wickham  (creator of ggplot) and whom we interviewed here at https://decisionstats.wordpress.com/2010/01/12/interview-hadley-wickham-r-project-data-visualization-guru/

Hadley is teaching two short courses at Vanderbilt university (read at http://gettinggeneticsdone.blogspot.com/2010/07/hadley-wickhams-ggplot2-data.html)

or download code and presentations here at http://had.co.nz/vanderbilt-vis/

They are a set of very very lucid and easy to understand presentations so even if you know very little R, or just want to learn visualization you can refer to them.

Here is the first lesson by Prof Hadley on Basics in Visualization using R.