R on DataScience.LA

SatRday LA - R Conference Announcement

Mon, 28 Jan 2019 01:25:06 -0800

Come and have fun with local useRs at SatRday LA on April 6, 2019. This is the first SatRday in LA, and the second in the states. If you have not heard of SatRday, it is a one-day affordable, inclusive, non-profit R conference organized by local R users.

R Meetup with Hadley Wickham

Sat, 28 Oct 2017 12:57:13 -0700

Update: Video of the 2nd half of the talk is here (1st half was not recorded, sorry):

This video is no longer available on YouTube (original link).

In our next meetup, we’ll have Hadley (I think no introduction needed).

Packages made easy
by Hadley Wickham

Meetup: Machine Learning in Production with Szilard Pafka

Fri, 28 Apr 2017 00:55:25 -0700

Update: Video recording of the meetup here:

▶ Machine Learning in Production with Szilard Pafka

Slides here:

Meetup: Stream processing with R in AWS

Wed, 08 Mar 2017 09:29:48 -0800

Update: Slides click here.

Video recording here:

This video is no longer available on YouTube (original link).

Stream processing with R in AWS
by Gergely Daróczi

Abstract: R is rarely mentioned among the big data tools, although it’s fairly well scalable for most data science problems and ETL tasks. This talk presents an open-source R package to interact with Amazon Kinesis via the MultiLangDaemon bundled with the Amazon KCL to start multiple R sessions on a machine or cluster of nodes to process data from theoretically any number of Kinesis shards. Besides the technical background and a quick introduction on how Kinesis works, this talk will feature some stream processing use-cases at CARD.com, and will also provide an overview and hands-on demos on the related data infrastructure built on the top of Docker, Amazon ECS, ECR, KMS, Redshift and a bunch of third-party APIs.

How-to organize a satRday conference (v0.1)

Fri, 18 Nov 2016 13:31:13 -0800

It has been over 2 months since the first satRday conference ended and I shared some quick impressions on that, where I also promised a follow-up post on my experiences as ending up being the main organizer of the event – this is what you are reading now. Although the idea was born at the EARL Boston conference last year, and I decided to take part in the project while living in Los Angeles – the conference took place in Budapest after all as logistics seemed to be easier there thanks to my closer relationship to the Hungarian R User Group.

XGBoost workshop and meetup talk with Tianqi Chen

Mon, 06 Jun 2016 09:00:50 -0700

XGBoost is a fantastic open source implementation of Gradient Boosting Machines, a general purpose supervised learning method that achieves the highest accuracy on a wide range of datasets in practical applications. Deep learning is all the hype now, but apart from specific domains such as images, speech or text (i.e. problems with higher-level abstractions to be learnt and/or perception problems, where deep learning achieved some remarkable results indeed), it is usually outperformed by Gradient Boosting in a majority of general business domains and supervised learning applications. Proof of this and also because XGBoost has an easy-to-use interface from both R and Python, XGBoost has become a favorite tool in Kaggle competitions. Besides feature engineering, cross-validation and ensembling, XGBoost is a key ingredient for achieving the highest accuracy in many data science competitions and more importantly in practical applications.

What has Kaggle learned from 2 million machine learning models?

Fri, 05 Feb 2016 16:36:40 -0800

What has Kaggle learned from 2 million machine learning models?

Anthony Goldbloom, founder and CEO of Kaggle

UPDATE:Video recording of the talk available here

Kaggle is a community of almost 450K data scientists who have built almost 2MM machine learning models to participate in our competitions. Data scientists come to Kaggle to learn, collaborate and develop the state of the art in machine learning. This talk will cover some of the lessons on winning techniques we have learned from the Kaggle community.

Big RAM is eating big data - Size of datasets used for analytics

Wed, 18 Nov 2015 09:41:22 -0800

With so much hype about “big data” and the industry pushing for “big data” analytical tools for everyone, the question arises how many people have big data (for analytics) and how many of them really need these tools (which are more complex and often more immature compared to the traditional tools for analytics).

R and Impala: it's better to KISS than using Java

Thu, 29 Oct 2015 15:10:25 -0700

One of the best things I like in working at CARD.com is that I am not only crunching R code in 24/7, but I also have the chance to interact with and improve the related data infrastructure with some interesting technologies.

After joining the company in January, I soon realized that while Impala is a very powerful database for handling data that do not comfortably fit in MySQL, it’s still not as fast as one might expect when querying large amount of data from R. Sometimes I had to wait several minutes for a query to run! So I used this spare time to think about how to improve the workflow.

Benchmarking Random Forest Implementations

Tue, 19 May 2015 08:30:44 -0700

I currently have the need for machine learning tools that can deal with observations of the order of 10 millions in the context of binary classification. That kind of data is a few GBs in size and it fits comfortably nowadays in the RAM of a decent single machine. It is a trivial task for linear models, as there are plenty of open source tools that can train a logistic regression with this amount of data on a single machine in a few seconds, even while using only 1 processor core (many of these tools are single-threaded). Linear models are also the gold standard of large-scale machine learning that can run on clusters, processing very large distributed datasets.

ASA DataFest 2015 at UCLA

Wed, 04 Mar 2015 10:00:20 -0800

What is DataFest?
#

DataFest is a team competition, where a team of up to 5 undergraduate students has less than 48 hours to provide the best insight gleaned from a large, complex data set — and communicate that insight to an audience of their peers and the DataFest judges. DataFest 2015 will be April 24th through the 26th, beginning at 6pm on Friday the 24th.

Data Science/Statistics/R @Google

Fri, 27 Feb 2015 11:50:48 -0800

This meetup will be hosted by Google and we’ll have Peter Lipman and Pete Meyer talk about the data science/statistics projects they have been working on at Google.

Human Evaluation Comparisons: Common Framework with Applications

We designed a study to determine whether being on device influenced a quality evaluator’s perception of ads quality. Here, we present a common framework, developed into an internal R package, that was used to analyze the study.

Yihui Xie presents HTML Widgets

Fri, 13 Feb 2015 10:35:31 -0800

The Shiny framework, by RStudio, is growing in popularity as a tool that makes it easy for R developers to leverage the web as a deployment platform for sharing their analysis. However, since the very earliest release of Shiny, the development group has been bombarded with the same series questions over and over again, questions like “Does it work with d3.js?” and “Can I use JavaScript in Shiny?”

Joe Cheng presents Shiny

Fri, 13 Feb 2015 10:25:38 -0800

The Shiny framework is a web application framework for the R programming language, designed by Joe Cheng, to help R programmers turn their analysis into interactive web applications. Fortunately, it does without requiring that the R programmer know HTML, CSS or JavaScript - greatly widening the possible audience of users. At the January DataScience.LA R Meetup, we were fortunate to have Joe Cheng, Software Engineer at RStudio and original architect of Shiny present an introduction to Shiny.

Re: Sorry for the mix up regarding Data Science candidates

Fri, 06 Feb 2015 11:25:56 -0800

This was originally posted on the author’s LinkedIn

You will find lots of advice on how to get a job as a data scientist. I want to add some signal to the noise.

I happen to be hiring for a Data Scientist or two as of this writing, and was thinking of doing a blog post on offering advice for those looking. But then I thought of something better and more insightful: It is a cut-and-paste of an email that I sent to our Director of Talent Acquisition last week when he asked me, “Can you share with me what you’re looking for in regards to your Data Scientist candidates?”

Secure your Shiny apps (against SQL injection)

Mon, 12 Jan 2015 09:25:12 -0800

Shiny takes inputs from UI elements and sends them to the server, where the application can access them as R variables. While Shiny has security measures in place, as in any typical web application, it remains the developer’s responsibility to sanitize the inputs before using them. For example, Shiny has no way to protect you if you are using an input in a SQL query such as select ... from ... where field = 'input'. Someone manipulating the websocket communication can craft a specially-formatted input that can force the database to execute a query that it is not supposed to do, termed an SQL injection. This might give an attacker access to private data or the ability to do other nefarious things, and it is a common security issue.

DataVis with Plot.ly (@plotlygraphs) - Meetup Summary

Tue, 30 Dec 2014 15:55:03 -0800

It pains me to admit it, but even though I had visited their site, created an account, and played around with their tools, I didn’t really get the value proposition behind Plot.ly. I already use ggplot, bokeh, and d3.js, I already use knitr and ipython notebooks, so why do I need a new way of posting my plots on a web page?

Meetup: DataVis with Plotly on December 16th

Fri, 12 Dec 2014 10:35:30 -0800

Plotly is a web-based platform for making graphs and analyzing data. Plotly’s APIs and web app let teams work together online to make 2D, 3D, and streaming graphs using R, Python, MATLAB, Julia, SAS, and and Excel, all together, all in one platform. The goal is to support technical and non-technical collaboration at all levels. Plotly translates ggplot2, matplotlib, and MATLAB plots into interactive, web-based, shareable plots.

dplyr - some more reflections

Thu, 04 Dec 2014 09:30:00 -0800

Yesterday, I published a post here on DataScience.LA with a simple/basic benchmark for dplyr. It was the main part of a short talk at our last Los Angeles R meetup. Below, I continue my thoughts with some reflections on dplyr’s API and philosophy, AKA the other part of my talk.

dplyr and a very basic benchmark

Wed, 03 Dec 2014 09:35:05 -0800

Earlier this month I gave a short talk about dplyr at the Los Angeles R meetup. It was one of the 5 talks about the useR! 2014 conference, and you can see the summaries and slides from the other 4 talks here.

LA R meetup - January 21: RStudio's Shiny with Joe Cheng

Thu, 20 Nov 2014 10:04:38 -0800

At this meetup we’re fortunate to have RStudio’s lead developer Joe Cheng flying in from Seattle to talk about Shiny. Shiny makes it possible to develop interactive web applications by writing only a handful of R code. It lowers the barriers to constructing interactive dashboards that you can use to better explain your results to your boss and/or co-workers, or it can help you productionalize your analysis so that others in your company can make use of it regularly without the need to continually bother you.

LA R Meetup Summary: Highlights from useR! 2014 - Part 2

Tue, 18 Nov 2014 09:20:24 -0800

Last week the LA R meetup featured another round of 5 speakers each highlighting a few things they had found interesting at the useR! 2014 conference. This was the second such event after the first one in September - probably because useR! was awesome enough that it inspired 10 volunteers to stand up on stage and talk more about it.

Hadley Wickham’s dplyr tutorial at useR! 2014, Part 2

Mon, 03 Nov 2014 10:00:28 -0800

Part 2 of the dplyr tutorial is now available! Hadley will be covering Grouped Mutate/Filter, Joins, Do, and Databases. (You can find Part 1 of the tutorial here.)

For our viewers who have just discovered the wonders of R, keep in mind that this tutorial was filmed in early July of 2014. As R packages naturally update over time (well, depending on the programmers!), please make sure to check Hadley’s Githubfor the latest changes to the dplyr package.

LA R Meetup - November 11: Highlights from the useR! 2014 conference - Part 2

Wed, 29 Oct 2014 09:16:21 -0700

At this meetup, five more LA R meetup members will present short talks of what they have learned at useR! 2014. This is the 2nd round of talks about useR! since we had twice as many volunteers to speak as we could accommodate in one meetup (indeed, useR! was that awesome). The first round of talks at our September meetup is summarized here (with slides).

JJ Allaire, the useR! 2014 interview

Wed, 15 Oct 2014 10:00:42 -0700

JJ Allaire has courageously bet, time and time again, on the cutting edge of technologies. In doing so, he has not only benefited from the fertile rains but has often times himself been the rainmaker. He has, to a great degree, democratized development on the web by bringing the power to create interactive web applications to a wider audience than those select few who had access to both a shell account and Unix knowledge. ColdFusion was a platform by the web and for the web, and its adoption revolutionized programming ‘for the web’ as its own worthy pursuit. This story also resolutely validates the idea that by creating tools for developers at the beginning of a time of revolutionary change in technology, one could not only validate the tools but also help stage the unfolding narrative as one with many participants.

Hadley Wickham's dplyr tutorial at useR! 2014, Part 1

Mon, 13 Oct 2014 10:02:53 -0700

Hadley Wickham (perhaps you’ve heard of his work) presented a 2 hour workshop on dplyr at this year’s useR! conference at UCLA. This tutorial was definitely a highlight of the week-long conference for me, and working on this tutorial video has also made me very appreciative of how versatile the dplyr package can be. It clearly is the chef’s knife of data science tools.

Hadley Wickham presents dplyr at useR! 2014

Mon, 13 Oct 2014 10:00:21 -0700

Hadley Wickham is hard at work, releasing packages which leverage the expressive power of R to keep easy things intuitive, and to make hard things possible. Having already developed a number of packages which address other steps in the data processing and analysis pipeline, he chose to address the process by which R developers ingest, manipulate, and transform data. This package, dplyr, is a narrowly focused library, designed to provide 90% of the functionality required in most data munging tasks. It may not solve every possible problem in data munging, but dplyr’s built in primitives will reduce your need to drop to “base R” for most common tasks. It does so by leveraging the magritr package’s “pipe” operator, and is inspired by dataflow programming constructs. It is fast, it is powerful, and it has been the single largest productivity boost that many of us here at DataScience.LA have adopted in 2014. In this video, Hadley provides a very quick introduction to the dplyr package, describing his philosophy behind the package’s design while providing a number of illustrative examples as to the flexibility, expressiveness, and power of this tool.

A Conversation with Joe Cheng at useR! 2014

Mon, 06 Oct 2014 10:18:56 -0700

Joe Cheng is a software engineer. Unfortunately the term gets thrown around pretty lightly, so I’d like to make sure that I convey the appropriate amount of gravitas when I refer to him as such. Joe Cheng is a *great* Software Engineer. He has worked for some of the largest technology companies on the planet, building cutting edge tools which empowered the web browser as a full blown platform instead of a historical curiosity. Joe is one of those software engineers who saw a future with the web as a platform for modern software, then worked hard to make it a reality. When the time came to build the next generation of data science IDEs, an IDE targeting the web as a platform, RStudio called Joe.

Packrat presentation at useR! 2014

Fri, 26 Sep 2014 11:25:44 -0700

There comes a time in a software toolchain’s lifecycle where the focus shifts from developer productivity and preference to the ability to deploy solutions in production which coexist gracefully in the enterprise. Configuration management and dependency management are two of the first points of friction in this transition, as the free-wheeling methods preferred by developers are at odds with the structured methods and isolation desired by administrators, who serve as gatekeepers to enterprise deployment. R is currently at this very point in the transition, in the midst of transformation from a language and environment used primarily in academic research to its growing place in the enterprise. At useR! 2014 there were a series of presentations on how dependency management can be addressed within the R ecosystem, ranging from “provider” side options (e.g. freezing CRAN and private repositories) to the client side options, where a project maintains its own dependencies as part of its codebase.

Data Science Toolbox Survey Results... Surprise! R and Python win

Wed, 24 Sep 2014 10:25:13 -0700

This is a re-publication of a blog post from a blog I created not long before we got the idea to start DataScience.LA, and in many aspects it is the genesis of DSLA (the blog’s name, the people getting together - thanks Eduardo, Amelia and Leigh). It was also the spark that lead to the creation of the Python Data Science LA meetup.

Dirk Eddelbuettel, the useR! 2014 Interview

Mon, 22 Sep 2014 10:35:04 -0700

First things first, Dirk Eddelbuettel was recently named ordinary. This seems contradictory, since Dirk is a known HPC expert, an organizer of the R in Finance conference, the creator of Rcpp, and a Debian contributor. These are only a few of the many accolades bestowed upon Dirk without even a hint of puffery. And yet, Dirk Eddelbuettel is considered ordinary. What makes Dirk ordinary? It should be mentioned that to the Vienna-based nonprofit that provides R’s leadership, the R Foundation for Statistical Computing, ‘ordinary’ means something quite different to the lay person. Ordinary members provide guidance and direction for the R Project for Statistical Computing. It’s hard to imagine someone more qualified than Dirk for this task.

Interactive Visualizations from R using rCharts

Thu, 18 Sep 2014 14:26:20 -0700

At useR! 2014 Ramnath Vaidyanathan gave a tutorial and a presentation on one of his current project, rCharts. This R package allows you to create, customize and share interactive visualizations straight from R. rCharts leverages several existing javascript visualization libraries such as polychart, MorrisJS, NVD3, xCharts, HighCharts, leaflet, and Rickshaw, providing R users a fantastic array of new features and visualization styles.

Interview with Romain Francois at useR! 2014

Mon, 15 Sep 2014 22:17:41 -0700

At the useR! 2014 conference, without a doubt one of the overriding themes was R’s history, legacy, and future as an interface into the “best of the best” algorithms which were available. Romain Francois’ package, Rcpp11, is very much the spirit and the letter of this ethos and telos of R as an interface. This package is a reimplementation of Dirk Eddelbuettel’s Rcpp package with an emphasis on C++ 11’s features. Whether it’s an R user hitting performance limitations, or someone trying to integrate a C/C++ library into their analysis, Romain’s tools are there to help.

Martin Maechler Invited Talk at useR! 2014 - Good Practices in R Programming

Thu, 11 Sep 2014 10:38:11 -0700

Martin Maechler is a member of R-Core. This distinction puts him in the very apex of understanding of the R programming language and environment. He is a professor of statistics with wide and varied interests and a leading expert in statistical computing environments. He is also a prolific programmer, evidenced by his maintenance of the officially recommended cluster package for unsupervised clustering and analytics, the lead developer of Emacs Speaks Statistics, and co-maintainer of the Matrix package… plus too many other contributions to list them all here.

LA R Meetup Summary: Highlights from the useR! 2014 Conference

Wed, 10 Sep 2014 09:45:20 -0700

Last week the LA R meetup featured 5 speakers each highlighting a few things they had found interesting at the useR! 2014 conference (which I had the pleasure of helping to organize this year in Los Angeles). This meetup proved to be interesting even to those of us who attended the conference (which was about half of our audience), simply because there were so many cool things to hear and enough parallel sessions at the conference that no one could possibly capture all of the action.

Heather Turner, the useR! 2014 Interview

Mon, 08 Sep 2014 23:58:02 -0700

Heather Turner is a biostatistician and Associate Fellow at the University of Warwick, as well as a consultant. She is a former editor of the R Journal, was a local organizer for the useR! 2011 conference, and holds a wealth of information about the field of data science, the state of the technology, and the wider community.

Shiny: R made interactive @ useR! 2014

Thu, 04 Sep 2014 11:13:51 -0700

At useR! 2014, one of the most anticipated presentations was Joe Cheng’s Shiny: R made interactive. It was but one of the of a fantastic series of talks by RStudio representatives; check out Winston Chang’s ggvis: Interactive graphics in R for another great talk. Shiny begins with your R code and ends with the customer’s view: an interactive, browser-accessible application. This enables you to place a great deal of power into your users’ hands to customize their view and provides a variety of new and innovative ways to interact with the data, such as by tuning parameters and focusing on sub-populations. Essentially, Shiny functions by allowing you to “wire up” up a reactive application, greatly speeding up the development of a data and analysis based web app.

The Importance of 'Janitorial Work' in Research

Tue, 02 Sep 2014 11:47:29 -0700

As someone who has spent a significant amount of time ‘data wrangling’ outside the field of data science, I found this recent New York Times article both highly interesting and nothing new - I’ve seen the same issue discussed in a variety of fields with similar automation solutions presented each time. Granted, there are fields where this janitorial drudgery is absolutely necessary, such as molecular biology. As a scientist working on researching mRNA expression you certainly have to keep RNase-free conditions, meaning you have to ‘clean up’ your bench in a more detailed way than you’d ever imagine before you can run your first PCR cycle. This includes specific protocols for washing your dishes several times with special water before you even start because if you don’t, you’re not likely to get any bands in your electrophoresis gel and you’ll lose several days (or weeks!) of work.

Win Books and T-shirts in Our DataScience.LA Meetup Raffles, Powered by R and dplyr!

Tue, 02 Sep 2014 09:41:54 -0700

We have a few pieces of swag that we are raffling off to the community at our upcoming meetup events. Our stash consists of 25 data-oriented books, primarily from O’Reilly plus 25 T-shirts from useR! 2014 conference and Revolution Analytics (see picture above). Did we get your attention?

Yihui Xie, the useR! 2014 Interview

Mon, 01 Sep 2014 11:00:48 -0700

In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

– Michael Crichton

Yihui Xie intended to make it easier to do his homework, but instead found himself tackling one of the greatest problems in modern science: the reproducibility of results.

Matt Dowle's data.table Talk from useR! 2014

Thu, 28 Aug 2014 11:04:36 -0700

Matt Dowle holds a wealth of knowledge and is worth listening to for a variety of reasons. He has worked for some of the world’s largest financial organizations, holding positions at the focal point between money and data. He has been programming in R for well over a decade. He has lived the open source mantra, by not only consuming open source software but also releasing his own community contributions to CRAN. On top of those accomplishments, he’s also quite funny and spins a heck of a good yarn.

David Smith, the useR! 2014 Interview

Mon, 25 Aug 2014 10:00:32 -0700

“At one point, the only source for daily R news was David Smith’s blog.” – Szilard Pafka

David Smith is an integral part of the R community. His background in computational statistics goes back to the early 90s . David has worked at Revolution R, one of the leading R companies, for nearly a decade. His name has been included in lists such as:

R in Production - Panel Discussion - LA R meetup @ useR! 2014

Thu, 21 Aug 2014 14:27:50 -0700

(Please click here if the video above doesn’t load.)

The video above is from an event at useR! 2014 consisting of Yasmin Lucero’s presentation plus an incredible panel discussion, which is included here. The title of the panel was “R’s Place in the Production Environment”, and was moderated by Tareef Kawaf, President at RStudio. Five high-profile members of the R community were on this panel, spanning the gamut of the enterprise:

R in Production - Opening Talk by Yasmin Lucero - LA R meetup @ useR! 2014

Thu, 21 Aug 2014 13:54:56 -0700

(Please click here if the video above doesn’t load.)

During useR! 2014, the LA R Meetup (run by Szilard Pafka) organized an event focused on R’s status in industry. This event took the form of a presentation by Yasmin Lucero, Senior Statistician at AOL-Gravity, followed by a panel discussion. The video above captures the presentation, where Yasmin provides an excellent overview of the current status of R in the enterprise and breaks down the taxonomy of solutions for which R is commonly chosen as a development platform. From batch reporting and dashboards for internal deployment to full blown public facing analytics data products, R has certainly found a home in business. Yasmin’s talk concludes with specific, operational aspects of managing R in the enterprise, such as library and dependency management. Enjoy the video and don’t forget to tune in for Part 2 of this session where the panel discussed “R’s Place in the Production Environment.”

Announcing the DSLA Podcast!

Mon, 18 Aug 2014 11:36:47 -0700

You’ve asked and we’ve listened. The audio content from our DataScience.LA interviews will now be released as a podcast! Check us out on iTunes or point your podcast app to here!

We’ve already released the audio from the userR! conference interviews of Hadley Wickham, Max Kuhn, and Tal Galili on iTunes and hope to release upcoming interviews in podcast form shortly after our video blog posts. Thanks for being a part of the DataScience.LA community and we look forward to hearing more from you!

A Conversation with Tal Galili at useR! 2014

Mon, 18 Aug 2014 10:31:16 -0700

“One can acquire everything in solitude except character.”

― Stendhal

The Interview
#

Tal Galili is, in many ways, a central spoke of the R community. Both gregarious and thoughtful, he has grown his website R-bloggers into the definitive aggregation of the R community’s voice through his genuine, passion-driven intensity. Tal had a simple desire as a young programmer - to learn more about his chosen tools - and looked to the internet to find other voices like his. When googling for “R blogs”, Tal found numerous blogs about pirates, but only a handful about R. This interview details how Tal started R-bloggers and decided to challenge the status quo, as well as giving us a peek behind the curtain for his new projects.

LA R meetup - September 4: Highlights from the useR! 2014 Conference

Thu, 14 Aug 2014 13:46:12 -0700

Five LA R meetup members will present short talks of what they learned at useR! 2014
(plus we have 5 more volunteers for the following meetup!)

1. Timothy J. Triche, Jr., PhD
Fellow, Jane Anne Nohl Division of Hematology, USC/Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center

Winston Chang's "Interactive Graphics with ggvis" at useR! 2014

Thu, 14 Aug 2014 10:15:15 -0700

Winston Chang’s “Interactive Graphics with ggvis” talk at useR! 2014 was in many ways a watershed moment for the the data science community, as the future directions of rich data visualization for analytics, communication, and the web were revealed. In this talk, Winston introduces the viewer to ggvis, lays out the fundamental architecture, and provides an overview of reactive architectures.

A Conversation with Max Kuhn - The useR! 2014 Interview

Mon, 11 Aug 2014 10:02:16 -0700

The Interview
#

In the video above, Max provides some amazing insights into the why and how of caret, an R package he created. He also discusses his book on Applied Predictive Modeling which he co-authored with Kjell Johnson, including details on how he set out to write the book he wished he would have had. As a special bonus, Max also describes Quinlan’s C5.0, an alternate “forest of decision trees” algorithm, the secrets of which were hidden behind commercial licensing for years - and which has recently been ported and made available to the R ecosystem. Whether you are a beginner just getting your feet wet with R and predictive modeling, or a seasoned data scientist, this interview has something for everyone.

John Chambers useR! 2014 Keynote

Wed, 06 Aug 2014 18:14:19 -0700

At useR! 2014, John Chambers was generous enough to provide us with insight into the very early stages of user-centric interactive data exploration. He explains, step by step, how his insight to provide an interface into algorithms, putting the user first has placed us on the fruitful path which analysts, statisticians, and data scientists enjoy to this day. In his talk, John Chambers also does a fantastic job of highlighting a number of active projects, new and vibrant in the R ecosystem, which are helping to continue this legacy of “a software interface into the best algorithms.” The future is bright, and new and dynamic ideas are building off these thoughtful, well measured, solid foundations of the past.

A Conversation with Hadley Wickham - the useR! 2014 interview

Wed, 06 Aug 2014 18:13:38 -0700

Hadley Wickham is famous. He’s not Kardashian famous, but walking around useR! and seeing the community’s reaction to him, there’s no question, he’s ‘R famous’. If you have the good fortune to see his talks, tutorials, or sessions in person, you owe it to yourself to do so. He projects depth and wisdom with a booming voice, which combines with a hard-won confidence brought about by years of honing his craft and developing his expertise. He takes as much time as is needed to answer questions, listens to every single bit of feedback and succeeds in making you feel that what you say indeed matters. Hadley Wickham has poise. It’s also quite obvious, if you watch him for long enough, that this fame suits him like an itchy sweater made by a loving grandparent. It brings warmth and it comes from a place of love, but it’s always a little uncomfortable regardless of how well it may fit.

Making Maps with a Punchline

Wed, 06 Aug 2014 18:09:43 -0700

I’ve had a lifelong fascination with maps, and working with R definitely enables my map habit. Perhaps there’s something about being an immigrant that made me particularly introspective, since from a very early age I was aware that I was “from” one place on the map and now lived at this “other place.”

Data science goes to college with DataFest

Wed, 06 Aug 2014 17:28:33 -0700

Below is the first of several exciting data science developments for the younger generation, happening right here in Los Angeles. This project is unique because it engages undergraduates in real data analysis, something that happens quite rarely in a classroom. If projects like this catch on as a new trend, we’re going to have some real competition for our jobs in a few years!

Welcome to Data Science LA!

Sat, 02 Aug 2014 21:12:52 -0700

Welcome! We are launching DataScience.LA to provide a home for all the content (slides, code, videos etc.) for several meetups in LA (Data Science/Machine Learning, R, DataVis etc.) and to engage the Los Angeles data science community in an open, active discussion about best practices and new developments in the field.

R on DataScience.LA

SatRday LA - R Conference Announcement

R Meetup with Hadley Wickham

Meetup: Machine Learning in Production with Szilard Pafka

Meetup: Stream processing with R in AWS

How-to organize a satRday conference (v0.1)

XGBoost workshop and meetup talk with Tianqi Chen

What has Kaggle learned from 2 million machine learning models?

Big RAM is eating big data - Size of datasets used for analytics

R and Impala: it's better to KISS than using Java

Benchmarking Random Forest Implementations

ASA DataFest 2015 at UCLA

What is DataFest? #

Data Science/Statistics/R @Google

Yihui Xie presents HTML Widgets

Joe Cheng presents Shiny

Re: Sorry for the mix up regarding Data Science candidates

Secure your Shiny apps (against SQL injection)

DataVis with Plot.ly (@plotlygraphs) - Meetup Summary

Meetup: DataVis with Plotly on December 16th

dplyr - some more reflections

dplyr and a very basic benchmark

LA R meetup - January 21: RStudio's Shiny with Joe Cheng

LA R Meetup Summary: Highlights from useR! 2014 - Part 2

Hadley Wickham’s dplyr tutorial at useR! 2014, Part 2

LA R Meetup - November 11: Highlights from the useR! 2014 conference - Part 2

JJ Allaire, the useR! 2014 interview

Hadley Wickham's dplyr tutorial at useR! 2014, Part 1

Hadley Wickham presents dplyr at useR! 2014

A Conversation with Joe Cheng at useR! 2014

Packrat presentation at useR! 2014

Data Science Toolbox Survey Results... Surprise! R and Python win

Dirk Eddelbuettel, the useR! 2014 Interview

Interactive Visualizations from R using rCharts

Interview with Romain Francois at useR! 2014

Martin Maechler Invited Talk at useR! 2014 - Good Practices in R Programming

LA R Meetup Summary: Highlights from the useR! 2014 Conference

Heather Turner, the useR! 2014 Interview

Shiny: R made interactive @ useR! 2014

The Importance of 'Janitorial Work' in Research

Win Books and T-shirts in Our DataScience.LA Meetup Raffles, Powered by R and dplyr!

Yihui Xie, the useR! 2014 Interview

Matt Dowle's data.table Talk from useR! 2014

David Smith, the useR! 2014 Interview

R in Production - Panel Discussion - LA R meetup @ useR! 2014

R in Production - Opening Talk by Yasmin Lucero - LA R meetup @ useR! 2014

Announcing the DSLA Podcast!

A Conversation with Tal Galili at useR! 2014

The Interview #

LA R meetup - September 4: Highlights from the useR! 2014 Conference

Winston Chang's "Interactive Graphics with ggvis" at useR! 2014

A Conversation with Max Kuhn - The useR! 2014 Interview

The Interview #

John Chambers useR! 2014 Keynote

A Conversation with Hadley Wickham - the useR! 2014 interview

Making Maps with a Punchline

Data science goes to college with DataFest

Welcome to Data Science LA!

What is DataFest?
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The Interview
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The Interview
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