Those who are disillusioned by the failings of opinion polling may be interested in Betfair Predicts—a set of predictions based on markets in their betting exchange.
R is no more scary than Excel
John Mount of Win-Vector looks at doing analysis in Excel and R. He concludes that R isn’t as scary as it sounds.
If you are an Excel jockey who’s heard about R, but has yet to take the plunge, it’s worth a look.
Twitter’s anomaly detection package for R
Twitter have an interest in detecting anomalies in their service. Anomalies could be down to user engagement, spamming or technical issues. Regardless of the reasons, it’s something they want to know about when it happens.
To aid detection of anomalies in their time series data they have developed, and open-sourced, an anomaly detection package for R. Their algorithm is based on the Generalized ESD Test and can detect both global and local anomalies. The package is also capable of detecting anomalies when seasonal and trend factors are present in the time series data.
R is fastest growing topic on Stack Overflow
Joshua Kunst has analysed Stack Overflow postings and found that R is currently the fastest growing topic.
Stack Overflow is a question and answer site popular with software developers. Questions are tagged with topics and these topics formed the basis of the analysis.
Kunst used R to perform the analysis and he provides a walk-through—making extensive use of the pipeline operator from the magrittr package to create readable functional code. His post is worth reading if you are familiar with, or are learning, R.
Why Managing Risk with Spreadsheets is Risky
I’m encouraged by the fact that some organizations I speak to are trying to get their spreadsheet sprawl under control. However, far too many remain ignorant of the risks they are shouldering.
Stratford Dick of Marsh ClearSight recently published an article describing how spreadsheets might be hurting your company. In his article he highlights the following risks.
- Spreadsheet development is time consuming
- It’s ridiculously easy to make typos
- Formatting inconsistencies can lead to misinterpretation of results
- As spreadsheets are mostly developed by individuals they’re not subject to formal checks and reviews
- Spreadsheets are rarely subject to version control—and are not really designed to be
- There is no enterprise-level security when using spreadsheets
- It can be time-consuming to extract and collate data from different spreadsheet models