Prolific R developer Hadley Wickham provided an interesting perspective on data science and statistics in a recent Priceonomics article. There are definitely some academic statisticians who just don't understand why what I do is statistics, but basically I think they are all wrong. What I do is fundamentally statistics. The fact that data science exists as a field is a colossal failure of … [Read more...]
Definite proof that Jim Carrey causes autism
Fun example of "confusing" correlation with causation. … [Read more...]
R Consortium
The R Consortium has just been announced - with Microsoft as a founding Platinum member. Google, HP and Oracle are Silver members. According to their website, the consortium is a group of businesses organized under an open source governance and foundation model to provide support to the R community, the R Foundation and groups and individuals, using, maintaining and distributing R … [Read more...]
R on Spark
The upcoming Apache Spark 1.4 release will include SparkR---an R package that will allow big data (Spark) analyses to be run from the R shell. Computations in SparkR will be comparable to those that use the native Scala language. Future developments are to include machine learning support. … [Read more...]
UK general election predictions
FiveThirtyEight is publishing forecasts for the 2015 UK general election. The site was founded by Nate Silver who made a name for himself creating models that were successful in forecasting the results of recent US elections. Current predictions are for even closer parity between the Conservatives and Labour, with the SNP comfortably in third place (but not fully in control of the balance of … [Read more...]