Kaggle, the predictive-analytics competition site, has analyzed the preferences of the 2,500 data scientists who participate in its competitions, and R was the most-preferred software of the competitors at 22.5%. The next-nearest alternative was Matlab, at 16%.
On a related note, the premier of the Australian state of New South Wales has just launched a competition on Kaggle to predict the traffic on Sydney's M4 motorway. It's great to see government promoting the use of data analysis to solve (or at least better understand) civic problems, and this competition comes with some serious prizemoney: AUD$10,000 (about the same in $USD). Might be worth your time spending the Thanksgiving break doing a little modeling in R...
No Free Hunch: Profiling Kaggle’s user base
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