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...]
R at Microsoft BUILD conference
R was prominent at last month's BUILD---Microsoft's conference for developers. Corporate Vice President for Machine Learning, Joseph Sirosh, said, if there is a single language that you choose to learn today...let it be R His keynote demonstrated a genomic data analysis using Revolution R Enterprise, recently acquired by Microsoft, running on a 1600 core Azure Hadoop cluster. Microsoft are … [Read more...]
Game theory pioneer John Nash killed in car crash
Sad to hear that game theory pioneer and Nobel Laureate John Nash was killed yesterday in a car accident. Game theory is used to study interactive decision-making. Nash made fundamental contributions to the field, leading to him being awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1994. … [Read more...]
Women’s Institute members “devastated” by spreadsheet error
Dozens of Women's Institute members have been removed from a Buckingham Palace garden party guest list after spending hundreds of pounds on new outfits and train tickets to London. Too many tickets were assigned due to "an administrative error with the spreadsheet". We've written before about the problems with spreadsheets. They continue to cause misery. … [Read more...]
Data Science Wars: R vs Python
A common question from those starting out on a data science career is "Should I learn R or Python?" Both are very popular in the data science community and, as ever, the answer is, "It depends." The DataCamp Blog has published an infographic that contrasts the two languages in an attempt to assist those faced with this choice. Of course, you could always just learn both---and SQL. … [Read more...]