Today marked the first day of the 2103 useR! conference, a gathering of more than 350 R users from around the world.
The conference has been quite a success so far, kicking off yesterday with a day of tutorials followed by a tapas-fueled welcome party in the center of Albecete. Today has been a full day of invited keynotes, contributed talks and posters on R applications, packages and practices. Here are just a few personal highlights from my notes:
Håvard Rue's keynote described the R-INLA package, which can quickly fit a subclass of Bayesian models (Latent Gaussian Models) without the need for MCMC.
Hugh Shahanan used Microsoft Azure's cloud service to automate the analysis a terabyte of microarray data in parallel with custom R scripting.
Constantino Garcia used time series analysis of the period between heartbeats (usign ECG data) to identify when patients were encountering bouts of apnea and other diseases.
Hadley Wickham's keynote described a extension to plyr for faster processing of data (even in databases), and a way of quickly visualizing large data sets.
Rob Hyndman described an elegant method of forecasting hierarchical time series, that provides a solution to the "bottom-up" vs "top-down" approach to forecasting a company's overall performance based on the forecast of individual departments and divisions. Chapter 9.4 of the free online book Forecasting: principles and practice describes the technique in detail.
There were many other excellent talks, and I'm looking forward to many more tomorrow. More later.
HI David,
thanks for mentioning my talk on Azure and R. I should add that there's a link with the C# project that allows one to connect with Azure on a separate github address (a sure sign of my megalomania) which is
http://www.github.com/hughshanahan/GWydiR
This is still pretty rough but we'll be getting it slicker over the next two months. If anybody wants to make use of this I can also provide a walk through.
Hugh
Posted by: Hugh Shanahan | July 10, 2013 at 23:31
Great talks, I'm glad that I made it!
Posted by: Kevin Davenport (@KevinLDavenport) | July 11, 2013 at 22:42