Revolutions

Pre-conference tutorials announced for useR! 2012

The worldwide R user conference, useR! 2012, will take place this year June 12-15 in Nashville, Tennessee. In addition to the regular program of invited and contributed talks, a highlight of every useR! is the pre-conference tutorials: hand-on, half-day in-depth expert-led sessions with a focused on a specific area of methodology with R. This year's roster of tutorials has been announced, with topics such as reproducible research, parallel programming, medical image analysis, Hadoop, predictive modeling, and many more. 

And as an extra-special bonus, Bill Venables (of Introduction to R fame) will present a one-day course on June 11. This session will be a "gentle survey of modern data analysis, graphics, and statistical modeling in the style of Modern Applied Statistics with S, Venables' classic textbook with co-author Brian D. Ripley, including developments both in R and statistics since the latest edition." Bill is one of the greatest tutors on statistics and R (he taught me most everything I know), so this is definitely not to be missed.

Tutorials often sell out, and early-bird registration for the conference is now open, so be sure to register early to secure your place. 

useR! 2012: Tutorials

 

 

Hadley Wickham goes behind the scenes on ggplot2

Hadley Wickham, creator of the ggplot2 packages for R (as well as several others) will present a webinar on February 8 going behind the scenes of the popular graphics package. If you've never used ggplot2 before, this will be a great way to learn about the kinds of charts you can create with it; and if you're a regular ggplot2 user Hadley will give a preview of some of the new big-data visualizations coming soon to the package. Here's the webinar overview:

Date:	Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Time:	11:00AM - 12:00PM Pacific Time (Click here for time in your local time zone)
Presenter:	Hadley Wickham, Professor of Statistics, Rice University

GGplot2 is one of R’s most popular, widely used packages, developed by Rice University’s Hadley Wickham. Ggplot2’s exploratory graphics capabilities are driving the use of R as a complement to legacy analytics tools such as SAS. SAS is well-regarded for its strength in data management and "production" statistics, where you know what you want to do and need to do it repeatedly. On the other hand, R is strong in data analysis and exploration in situations where figuring out what is needed is the biggest challenge. In this important way, SAS and R are strong companions.

This webinar will provide an all-access pass to Hadley’s latest work. He’ll discuss:

• A brief overview of ggplot2, and how it's different to other plotting systems
• A sneak peek at some of the new features coming to the next version of ggplot2
• What’s been learned about good development practices in the 5 years since first starting to develop ggplot
• Some of the internals of ggplot2, and talk about how he is gradually making it easier for others to contribute

Join this webinar to understand how ggplot2 adds valuable, unmatched capabilities to your analytics toolbox. 

To register for this webinar, follow the link below.

Revolution Analytics webinars: A backstage tour of ggplot2 with Hadley Wickham

Submit a paper to the R/Finance conference

For anybody using the R language to analyze financial data, the R/Finance conference is the conference of the year. If you have something to share about applied finance with R, the call for papers is now open. The details are below, and the deadline for submissions is January 31, 2012. 

R/Finance 2012: Applied Finance with R
May 11 and 12, 2012
University of Illinois, Chicago, IL, USA

The fourth annual R/Finance conference for applied finance using R will be held on May 11 and 12, 2012 in Chicago, IL, USA on the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago. The two-day conference will cover topics including portfolio management, time series analysis, advanced risk tools, high-performance computing, market microstructure, and econometrics. All will be discussed within the context of using R as a primary tool for financial risk management, portfolio construction, and trading.

Over the past three years, R/Finance has included attendees from around the world and featured keynote presentations from prominent academics and practitioners. We anticipate another exciting line-up for 2012 --- including keynote presentations from Blair Hull, Paul Gilbert, Rob McCulloch, and Simon Urbanek.

We invite you to submit complete papers or one-page abstracts (in txt or pdf format) for consideration. Academic and practitioner proposals related to R are encouraged. We welcome submissions for full talks, abbreviated "lightning talks", and for a limited number of (longer) pre-conference seminar sessions.

Presenters are strongly encouraged to provide working R code to accompany the presentation/paper. Data sets should also be made public for the purposes of reproducibility (though we realize this may be limited due to contracts with data vendors). Preference may be given to presenters who have released R packages.

Travel and accommodation grants may be available for selected presenters at the discretion of the committee. In addition, the conference will award prizes for best papers. To be eligible for a best paper award, a submission must be a full paper. Extended abstracts, even if a full paper by conference time, are not eligible for a best paper award.

Please send submissions to: committee at RinFinance.com.

The submission deadline is January 31, 2012. Submitters will be notified of acceptance via email by February 28, 2012. Notification of whether a presentation will be a long presentation or a lightning talk will also be made at that time.

Additional details will be announced at this website as they become available. Information on previous year's presenters and their presentations are also at the conference website R/Finance 2009, 2010 and 2011.

For the program committee:

Gib Bassett, Peter Carl, Dirk Eddelbuettel, Brian Peterson, 
Dale Rosenthal, Jeffrey Ryan, Joshua Ulrich

Thinking inside the box: R / Finance 2012 Call for Papers 

 

Free ggplot2 webinar from Hadley Wickham

The Orange County R Users Group is hosting a free webinar presented by Hadley Wickham, author of the ggplot2 graphics package for R. The webinar, "Advanced Visualizations in R with Hadley Wickham" is live from 6PM-7PM Pacific Time tomorrow, December 1. You can register at the LinkedIn event page below, as long as there are spaces left (it's limited to 100).

LinkedIn: Advanced Visualizations in R with Hadley Wickham 

Webinar Tomorrow: What's new in Revolution R Enterprise 5.0

A reminder that Sue Ranney will be presenting the webinar New Features in Revolution R Enterprise 5.0 (Including RevoScaleR) to support Scalable Data Analysis tomorrow (Thursday) at 11AM Pacific time. To whet your appetite, here's another video demonstation of more of the new big data analysis features, including the rxDataStep function to preprocess a data set using R functions and out-of-memory streaming:

 

Revolution Analytics Webinars: New Features in Revolution R Enterprise 5.0 (Including RevoScaleR) to support Scalable Data Analysis

 

Webinar Nov 17: What's new in Revolution R Enterprise 5.0

Revolution R Enterprise 5.0 will be released soon, and Sue Ranney, VP of Development at Revolution Analytics, will host a webinar on Thursday November 17 to get you up to speed on the latest features:

Revolution R Enterprise 5.0 is Revolution Analytics’ scalable analytics platform.  At its core is Revolution Analytics’ enhanced Distribution of R, the world’s most widely-used project for statistical computing.  In this webinar, Dr. Ranney will discuss new features and show examples of the new functionality, which extend the platform’s usability, integration and scalability.  We’ll discuss the following basic use cases:

• “I don’t have big data.” Why use Revolution R Enterprise 5.0 to get started?
  
  • Easy to get started; consistent interface for “start-to-finish” data analysis with functions for data import (text, SAS, SPSS, ODBC), data transformations & manipulation, and basic data analysis -  all with guidance from the R Productivity Environment.
  • Performance gains for analyzing in-memory data sets 
    
    
• “I don’t have big hardware.” Big data on your desktop.
  
  • Data sets with 100-million observations and many variables can be easily processed on your desktop using Revolution R Enterprise 5.0 
  • Avoid getting locked into memory-bound analyses. 
    
    
• “I have big data, and need to be ready for tomorrow’s even bigger data.” Scaling data analysis to a cluster. 
  
  
• “I need to write my own scalable analyses.” Creating your own scalable R extensions.

Register for the webinar at the link below.

Revolution Analytics Webinars: New Features in Revolution R Enterprise 5.0 (Including RevoScaleR) to support Scalable Data Analysis

Webinar on Portfolio Rebalancing with R and Sybase

R users in the financial industry may be interested in the following webinar hosted by Revolution Analytics' partner Sybase on November 10:

Portfolio Rebalancing Using R and Sybase RAP for Intraday Risk Management 

With volatility and violent intraday swings becoming the new normal, intraday risk controls are now needed to not only reduce your exposures across multiple asset classes, but also to gain competitive advantage. This webinar, hosted by Sybase and Yale researchers from Phronesis will demonstrate using a sample portfolio, how you can rebalance the portfolio to minimize risk while increasing returns.   

It will make use of the R "PerformanceAnalytics " package for optimal portfolio rebalancing while minimizing risk. The webinar will leverage Sybase RAP, a platform for market data management and analytics, for storing historical market data, which can be accessed from R, and the relevant subset of historical data can be pre-processed and extracted for analysis within R.  Results of rebalancing the portfolio using different timeframes (daily, vs. weekly, etc.) will be discussed. 

Join Sybase and Yale researchers from Phronesis as we discuss how usage of R and Sybase RAP can improve portfolio rebalancing and intraday risk oversight. 

Date:
Thursday, November 10th 2011

Time: 
11am EST

Duration:
1 hour

You can register for this webinar (free reg. req'd) at the link below:

Sybase webcasts: Portfolio Rebalancing Using R and Sybase RAP for Intraday Risk Management

Tomorrow: ACM Data Mining Camp at eBay

If you're in the Bay Area, tomorrow would be a great day to head down to San José for the ACM Data Mining Camp. Hundreds of data scientists, data hackers and data miners will be there for a fun "unconference", with talks and practical sessions organized on the spot according to demand. Revolution Analytics is proud to be a continuing sponsor of this great event, and team members Joe Rickert and Antonio Piccolboni will be there to talk about R, RevoScaleR and the RHadoop project.

The camp kicks off at 11:15AM at the eBay campus. There is also a Hadoop training class starting at 8:30 ($35, register in advance) and drop-ins during the day are also welcome. Click the link below for full details.

ACM Data Mining Camp: October 2011

Webinar Oct 13: Successful uses of R in Banking

On Thursday October 13, Hong Ooi from ANZ (Australia and New Zealand Banking Group) will give a webinar presentation on Successful Uses of R (along with SAS and Excel) in Banking. We've covered Hong's use of R for credit risk analysis here on the blog before, and in next week's webinar he'll take an in-depth look at applying R and SAS to analysis of mortgages, loan portfolios and probabilities of default. The full abstract is below, and you can register for the webinar at the Revolution Analytics website.

Date:	Thursday, October 13th, 2011
Time:	1:00PM - 2:00PM Pacific Time (Click here for the webinar time in your local time zone)
Presenter:	Hong Ooi, Ph.D.,  Statistician at Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ)

Hong Ooi’s analysis supports bottom line-impacting decisions made a wide spectrum of groups at Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ). He has broad experience with both SAS and R, and depends on R for the bulk of his analysis. In this webinar, he will discuss his challenges, how he’s using R along with SAS and Excel to overcome them in areas such as:

• Fitting models for mortgage loss given default,
• Monte Carlo application for stress-testing loan portfolios (in combination with SAS and Excel, which was used to enable access to the model for business users),
• Framework for calculating through-the-[economic]-cycle probabilities of default.

Hong will share some of the clever ways he’s using R to achieve innovation and improved performance.  He will also talk about some of the challenges involved in getting R accepted in a conservative financial institution workplace.

Revolution Analytics Webinars:  Successful Uses of R (along with SAS and Excel) in Banking

A brief introduction to R for SAS and SPSS users

If you've used SAS or SPSS and want a jump-start into the basics of the popular R language, next week's webinar, Introduction to R for SAS and SPSS Users will be of interest to you. While R, SAS and SPSS are all three software systems for data analysis and graphics, the underlying concepts in R are quite different to those in SAS and SPSS.

To get SAS and SPSS users up to speed with the basics of R, Bob Muenchen (University of Tennessee) will give a 60-minute webinar on Wednesday, October 5. It will include:

• What R is and how it compares to SAS and SPSS
• An overview of how to install and maintain it
• How to find R add-on modules comparable to those for SAS and SPSS
• Which of R’s many user interfaces are most like those of SAS and SPSS
• How to run R from within SAS and SPSS
• What a simple R program looks like
• Live Q&A with Bob Muenchen

Bob is the perfect presenter for this topic: he is the author of R for SAS and SPSS Users (and, with Joseph M. Hilbe, R for Stata Users). He is also the creator of r4stats.com, a popular web site devoted to helping people learn R. Bob also serves on advisory panels for IBM’s SPSS Corporation and SAS Institute. 

This live webinar takes place 11:00AM - 12:00PM Pacific Time on Wednesday, October 5. (Click here for the webinar time in your local time zone). Register and the link below for details on how to join the live session.

Revolution Analytics Webinars: Introduction to R for SAS and SPSS Users