Revolutions

R workshops in Vancouver

Isabella Ghement of the Ghement Statistical Consulting Company is presenting two R workshops in Vancouver, British Columbia:

"An Introduction to the Statistical Software Package R" (April 15-16,2010; 8:30am-4:30pm; BCIT; Vancouver)

"Advanced Statistical Modeling Using the Statistical Software Package R" (May 20-21, 2010; 8:30am-4:30pm; BCIT; Vancouver)

Click the links for more information and registration details.

Frank Harrell to teach Regression Modeling Strategies short course

If you're using regression models but want really hone your regression-fu this short course on Regression Modeling Strategies by Frank Harrell looks really interesting. Frank is the author of the book Regression Modeling Strategies which is my go-to reference whenever I'm doing regression of any kind in R, so it's definitely worth a trip to Nashville to if you want to learn how to make regression really work. Registration closes March 1, and the 3-day course begins March 31.

By the way, if you haven't tried them already check out Frank's rms package (formerly the Design package, a package of regression tools to accompany the book) and also his Hmisc package. Hmisc has a bunch of useful utilities (PDF) to extend the R language in various ways -- the tools for creating attractive tables in LaTeX are especially useful. 

Department of Biostatistics, Vanderbilt University: 2010 Upcoming short courses in Regression Modeling Strategies

REvolution's new partner in Australia

REvolution Computing has a new partner in Australia: Presciient, who provide training and consulting using REvolution R Enterprise. I recently spoke with Presciient's Director Eugene Dubossarsky to find out about Presciient and the state of R Down Under.

Presciient was formed about 18 months ago when Eugene and Steve Samild teamed up to provide statistical, data mining, business intelligence and reporting services in the Sydney area. With more than 20 years experience in data mining and business intelligence applications between them, Steve and Eugene have grown the practice and now serve clients throughout Australia.

Eugene got started with S (the precursor to R) in the early nineties, and in the past 6 years has been using R as his preferred analytics tool as a senior consultant. Eugene is also a founder of the Institute of Analytics Professionals of Australia (which now has over 800 members across Australia) and started up a special interest group focused on open-source software.

Open source tools are a key part of Presciient's practice. "If a company is new to analytics, we will always say start with open source or commodity tools, and invest in skills rather than software", said Eugene. Presciient's clients became interested in R after reading the New York Times article about R in January, but were still uncertain about bringing open-source tools into their commercial environment. "That's where REvolution Computing comes in," said Eugene. "Our clients hear ,'The problem with R is lack of support, and large data sets' and then REvolution R Enterprise addresses those problems."  With REvolution's R distribution, Presciient is now delivering industry-strength commercial data analysis and data mining to its clients across Australia. There are also growing links into Asia; commercial tools are more expensive in relative terms in cities like Bankgkok, Singapore and Hong Kong, increasing the appeal of open-source solutions.

An area of active development for Presciient is deploying dashboards as a Business Intelligence (BI) tool. They are currently using REvolution R Enterprise as a prototyping tool, and plan to use it as the basis of future production deployments.

Presciient will soon conduct their first training course on REvolution R in Sydney, Australia. The two-day training course, "An Introduction to REvolution R", will run on November 24-25, and cover a range of topics including:

• Basic input and output
• Data structures and manipulation
• Programming in R
• Basic statistics
• Graphs and visualisation
• Using R packages
• R help and resources
• Predictive modelling

To register for this course, please visit Presciient's training site.

R courses from Hadley Wickham, Hastie & Tibshirani

There are two great R courses coming up in the next couple of months that you might want to check out:

On September 25-26 in Austria, Trevor Hastie and Robert Tibshirani will be drawing on the seminal book The Elements of Statistical Learning:Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction for an in-depth data mining course. The course is titled "Statistical Learning and Data Mining III: State-of-the-Art Statistical Methods for Data Analysis, Ten Hot Ideas for Learning from Data" and from the syllabus (not to mention the speakers!) it looks to be an excellent course for anyone interested in doing predictive analytics with R. 

Then, on October 19, Hadley Wickham will be giving a one-day course on his ggplot2 package in Austin (or you can participate remotely via the web). It's called "Looking at Data: Learning to Explore Data with Graphics", and it seems ideal for any R user with an interest in improving their data visualization tools.

REvolution Computing training series announced

We've seen so much demand for the previously-announced training courses in April and training in R in general that we've decided to expand them to an entire series. You can see the dates of the upcoming courses on our events page.

Yale University Assistant Professor John Emerson will lead the inaugural seminar, “An Introduction to R Using Real World Examples,” on April 22 in Microsoft’s Radio City Conference Room in New York City. Professor Emerson will examine the qualitative exploration of real-world problems as well statistical modeling, the package management system, and the interface to C/C++ and Fortran.

The second seminar titled, “High-Performance Computing with R” will be taught by REvolution Director of Engineering Services Bryan Lewis. Held at the University of Illinois at Chicago on April 23, the session will explore high-performance computing (HPC) technologies for the R language, focusing on recent significant gains in HPC-related packages for R including RMPI, SNOW, ParallelR and many more.

Both seminars will be conducted in a hands-on, classroom style setting.  Computers will not be provided.  Registrants are required to bring their own laptops.

Upcoming R courses from REvolution Computing

(Reposted with a change of date.) REvolution Computing is offering two R courses in April.  Click on the links below for details and registration information.

(New Date!) April 22 (New York City): What's  All The Fuss About R? An Introduction to R Using Real-world Examples.

REvolution Computing’s one-day, hands-on basic R training provides an introduction to R through the quantitative exploration of real-world problems. We’ll begin by using R for exploratory data analysis and statistical inference; specific topics include graphical methods (both base and grid graphics) and hypothesis testing via parametric and non-parametric methods. This introduction motivates a more formal presentation of the R language, including types of objects, reading/writing data, functions, loops, and control statements. Other strengths of R will be addressed, including statistical modeling, classes and methods, the package management system, and the interface to C/C++ and Fortran.

April 23 (Chicago): High-Performance Computing in R. High-performance computing (HPC) technology is more available and affordable than ever before. Productively using HPC computing has remained surprisingly difficult, particularly with high-level scripted languages like R. Fortunately, that is changing. The last few years have seen significant gains in high-quality HPC computing-related packages for R including RMPI, SNOW, ParallelR and many more. This one-day course will present an overview of available HPC technologies for the R language, and will demonstrate each technology with simple examples that can be used as starting points for more sophisticated work. (Ideal for attendees of R/Finance 2009.)

Workshop on graphics in R by author of ggplot, Washington DC, 30-31 July

Hadley Wickham, author of the excellent ggplot2 package for R, is presenting a 2-day workshop on graphics in R. The course will naturally include discussion of both static graphics (with ggplot2) and dynamic and interactive graphics (with Ggobi).  The course will be held July 30-31 in Washington DC (perfect if you plan to attend JSM 2009.)

Looking at Data: 2-day graphics workshop in Washington DC

Course: Statistical Learning and Data Mining III

The following course was announced on r-help yesterday.  It will be presented by frequent R contributors Trevor Hastie and Robert Tibshirani, and runs March 16-17 in Palo Alto, California. 

Short course: Statistical Learning and Data Mining III:
Ten Hot Ideas for Learning from Data

Trevor Hastie and Robert Tibshirani, Stanford University

  Sheraton Hotel
  Palo Alto, CA
  March 16-17, 2009
This two-day course gives a detailed overview of statistical models   for data mining, inference and prediction. With the rapid developments in internet technology, genomics, financial risk modeling, and other high-tech industries, we rely increasingly more on data analysis and statistical models to exploit the vast amounts of data at our fingertips.

In this course we emphasize the tools useful for tackling modern-day data analysis problems. From the vast array of tools available, we have selected what we consider are the most relevant and exciting. Our top-ten list of topics are:

Regression and Logistic Regression (two golden oldies),
Lasso and Related Methods,
Support Vector and Kernel Methodology,
Principal Components (SVD) and Variations: sparse SVD, supervised PCA, Multidimensional Scaling and Isomap, Nonnegative Matrix Factorization, and Local Linear Embedding,
Boosting, Random Forests and Ensemble Methods,
Rule based methods (PRIM),
Graphical Models,
Cross-Validation,
Bootstrap,
Feature Selection, False Discovery Rates and Permutation Tests.  

The lectures will consist of video-projected presentations and discussion. Go to the site http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~hastie/sldm.html for more information and online registration.

Course: Intermediate Bioconductor: Analyzing Microarray and Sequencing Experiments

The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle is hosting an intermediate Bioconductor course January 21-23. This course will demonstrate how the Bioconductor project provides a comprehensive framework for analyzing mircoarray and sequencing data.

For more information and to register: Intermediate Bioconductor: Analyzing Microarray and Sequencing Experiments.

Course: Regression Modeling Strategies, Tennessee USA, Feb 2-6 2009

REGRESSION MODELING STRATEGIES

presented by

Frank E. Harrell, Jr., Ph.D.

Professor and Chair

Department of Biostatistics

Vanderbilt University School of Medicine

February 2 - 6, 2009

Vanderbilt University Medical Center Campus

Five-Session Short Course by Frank Harrell, Jr., Ph.D., Professor and Chair, Department of Biostatistics, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, February 2 - 6, 2009.  Requirements: strong competence in

multiple regression models.  Target audience: statisticians and related quantitative researchers who want to learn some general model development strategies, including approaches to missing data imputation, data reduction, model validation, and relaxing linearity assumptions.

Registration Deadline: January 16, 2009

To register please email Eve Anderson at eve.a.anderson@vanderbilt.edu

For full course details, please visit the website below:

http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/rms