Revolutions (Revolution Analytics)

I started using R because I needed a better tool for formal statistical analysis. (Econometrics, didn't want to pay for STATA. Much better packages around variants of linear regressions + panel/time series data than python). Since, I've used it for some random scripts, data visualizations, and financial analysis (Josh Ulrich's packages + tidyquant). R is a thoroughbred at doing data analysis from your laptop. It's bad at living on a server and operating any sort of app. For your use case (NBA analytics) I think it is a great tool and would recommend R. In fact, here are a couple packages/tutorials specifically for doing that: http://asbcllc.com/nbastatR/ https://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/09/analyzing-nba-basketball-…

R (and its predecessor S) is so great, thank you for writing and sharing this! In a way, R is very similar to APL and J in that many operations automatically scale from scalars to vectors, and you can therefore conveniently express applications of operations to many elements at once. In fact, even its assignment operator is chosen to syntactically resemble that of APL: https://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2008/12/use-equals-or-arrow-for-a… Regarding the quote: "All statistical models and tests have underlying mathematical assumptions on the types of conditions upon we can generate reliable results (Hoekstra et al., 2012)." Indeed! There is hence also a very close connection between statistics and logic.

Sorry for this nerd-interruption: The plural of anecdote is data, at least as said by that aphorism's inventor, Raymond Wolfinger: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2011/04/the-plural-of-anecdote-is-… https://web.archive.org/web/20080523225000/http://listserv.linguistlis… Both variations are insightful; I like using Wolfinger's because it is an accurate observation that all data start out as anecdotes, and are influenced/distorted by the collection and filtering process. Still, this also implies that one outlying anecdote is not enough evidence alone to dismiss the aggregate findings across all of the other anecdotes.

R Five or so years ago it as an esoteric language for statisticians, which had been around forever (especially if you count the predecessor S language). Now the IEEE ranks it the 5th(!) most important (or something?) language[1], and it's the fastest growing language on StackOverflow[2]. That's a pretty amazing change for a language which has few redeeming factors (ha!) as a language, apart from lots of very useful libraries. [1] http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/07/r-moves-up-to-5th-place-in… [2] http://jkunst.com/r/what-do-we-ask-in-stackoverflow/

I guess it depends on your background and field of interest. Maybe this helps: http://r4ds.had.co.nz But note it's a blind recommendation, I didn't know about this particular book before. I found a long list of books here: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/11/r-recommended-reading.html

weeeeelllllllll... http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2011/04/the-plural-of-anecdote-is-… whether it is or isn't, great post.

> It is true that this system can be used to program arbitrary logic, it can however become a bit clunky when trying to code imperative logic that works with inplace references and mutable data structures. Nevertheless it is a very powerful domain tool for working in scientific computing and the number of functions related to technical domains that are surfaced in the language represents decades of meticulous expert domain expertise. Can you explain this more? Why is (i.e.) the Wolfram Programming Language best thought of as a "domain" tool, and not a general purpose programming language? Why couldn't someone build an extraordinarily complex piece of software (say with millions of lines of code) under term-rewriting paradigm (like Wolfram) in a domain that has nothing to do with traditional mathematics/scientific computing? BTW, my favorite Wolfram fact is that it is the most concise programming language on the Rosetta: https://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2012/11/which-programming-languag…

> R has nothing going for it except a rapidly dwindling number of packages that don't yet have a direct python equivalent. This is not a true statement. Here are the data that goes against this statement. 1. https://www.r-bloggers.com/on-the-growth-of-cran-packages/ 2. https://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/01/cran-10000.html 3. https://www.r-bloggers.com/rs-remarkable-growth/ From 2015 to 2016: ~6,200 to More than 8,000 in April, 2016 From 2016 to 2017: CRAN now has 10,000 R packages. > Even then, the incoming generation of undergrads are increasingly proficient with programming and are shying away from R the same way that they shied away from Matlab after scipy matched it for 95% of their tasks. This is a generalization. So far you've made opinionated negative generalization with no data. Python is great because it learn from Matlab and took many great ideas and inspirations from Matlab. But I'm not going to make sweeping negative statements about Matlab or pretend to know how it going when I don't have enough data or experiences in it.

Every language has its warts but R is actually the least disliked language https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/10/31/disliked-programming-languages/ and http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/11/r-is-the-least-disliked-pr… I really enjoy R and the more I learn programming the more I enjoy it. Best thing I ever did was learn the language Racket and How to Design Programs and Hadley Wickham's tidyverse. I moved from Python to R about six years ago. Before that I did most of my work in the command-line. R's rise in popularity has been caused by the libraries in the tidyverse and data.table. The millions of dollars invested into R by many companies and an amazing eco-system > You can use '=' and '<-' to assign values to variables and both do the same, except in a few edge-cases where you now spend one week finding the error Its just R's symantics. It is almost universaly spoken to just use <- for style consistency and edge cases. Use the RStudio shortcut `Alt` and `-`. The reason you spend a week is the reason why it is recommended for all users to just use <-. > It confuses and mixes functional programming and oop not only per entity but also between the usage of them. Want to get a value of entity X? use x.getValue(). Want to get a value of entity Y? Use Y.getValue(y). R comes from S the creators of R were also inspired by Scheme. Personally I learned the language Racket to be a better R programmer and I pretty much live in the Functional side of R.…

“The Datasaurus Dozen”: https://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/05/the-datasaurus-dozen.html

https://deferentialgeometry.org/papers/Doran,%20Lasenby%20-%20Geometri… page 28, equation 2.36. Thanks a lot I'll take a dive into this Note: my inquiry was motivated by this: https://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2014/01/the-fourier-transform-exp…

This visualization on Wikipedia was what I needed to understand Simpson's Paradox, the descriptions never made a whole lot of sense to me until seeing it like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox#/media/File:Simpsons… Along the same lines of "visualize your data to see what's really going on" is Anscombe's Quartet: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anscombe%27s_quartet And then there's the Datasaurus [Dozen], which has some fun with the idea behind Anscombe's Quartet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datasaurus_dozen (you can see it animated here: https://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/05/the-datasaurus-dozen.html )

The trope about SAS being required is pretty old... people trotted that out when I last worked in pharma ~15 years ago. The FDA specifically released an article saying that R is perfectly acceptable for submission https://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2012/06/fda-r-ok.html Please don't spread the SAS FUD. I work in Pharma and talk to the statisticians all the time.

What do you guys think of https://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2014/01/the-fourier-transform-exp…

Sql Server + R 6 years ago, scoring transactions at 1M/sec https://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/09/fraud-detection.html

This study compares how concise 14 programming languages are (it places R third, after mathematica and clojure): https://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2012/11/which-programming-languag… Source of R code: https://github.com/stevecondylios/iteratoR/blob/main/R/iterator.R#L75

Kind of like Stuart Riffle's colorized Fourier Transform. (version here -> https://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2014/01/the-fourier-transform-exp… archived with artifacts here -> https://web.archive.org/web/20120418231513/http://www.altdevblogaday.c…

It's a thing, though it seems to have an successor in "ridge plot": https://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/07/joyplots.html

Probably something very concise/dense/terse. https://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2012/11/which-programming-languag… Potentially J or Lua, which were not analyzed in that article. However, Python has a lot of different styles, and those using comprehensions and Julia can often be incredibly concise, but typical highly-readable Python code probably is not particularly concise.

Case in point, see https://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2014/08/statistics-losing-ground-…

It's a somewhat well-known quote that gets interpreted all sorts of ways. https://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2011/04/the-plural-of-anecdote-is…

This article compares FastR to GNU-R v3.4.0 -- but there were some important changes in v3.5.0 (see http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/04/r-350.html). I'm not even sure GNU-R is the most important comparison (although it is an important comparison). How does it compare to R with Intel MKL? How does it compare to other (faster) languages?

This is a myth: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2012/06/fda-r-ok.html https://www.fda.gov/downloads/forindustry/datastandards/studydatastand…

> It seems likely that R could have been designed to have the same strengths without having so many weird and arbitrary quirks. Not really... at least not practically. R is a successor to S which was written in 1976 (fun talk on the history: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/07/rick-becker-s-talk.html). Many of the arbitrary quirks started out for the sake of backward compatibility with S. All that being said, yeah, you could probably design a 'modern R' without the weird and arbitrary quirks.

> Perhaps anecdotes, in large enough numbers, are data. This was actually the original gist of that famous quote! http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2011/04/the-plural-of-anecdote-is-…

One of the lead developers on the Azure suite wrote a blog post that might explain some of the differences: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/06/syberia.html. A rough analogy is that Rails is to AWS/Heroku like Syberia is to Azure. You can replace the underlying components in your project with calls to Azure services, but a large developer team may prefer to work in a unified codebase over a set of UI tools.

Depends - where do you live? You might be a crawdad or crawfish: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2013/06/r-and-language.html

This is a repost (syndication?) of a blog post at: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/02/finding-radioheads-most-de… which is a summary of a blog post at: http://rcharlie.com/2017-02-16-fitteR-happieR/ I didn't know that Spotify has an API. I see mention of a rate limit in the docs, but I can't find the actual limit. If I want to sort the tracks from albums released in a given year (say, ten to fifty out of a thousand-album collection) by Spotify popularity, will the limit get in the way?

While that version is much more popular, it's a mutation of the original quote which actually stated the exact opposite: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2011/04/the-plural-of-anecdote-is-…

Before S there were onerous Fortran routines. Rich Becker, one of the authors of S gave a really interesting talk about this at the useR conference this year, you should check it out if you haven't already: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/07/rick-becker-s-talk.html You say that developing S was a misstep, what decision would you have made instead? Build on Fortran?