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Discoveries and Discussions at useR! 2014 (UCLA)
[email protected]
LA-R Users (Meetup) Group
Thursday, September 4, 2014
Santa Monica, CA
This document is available at: smithw.org/user.pdf
1. Some new R Books (I’ve brought a few with me today):
Cotton, R. (2013), Learning R, O’Reilly.
Kolaczyk, E, at al. (2014), Statistical Analysis of Network Data with R, Springer.
Jockers, M. (2014), Text Analysis with R for Students of Literature, Springer.
Pollock, P. (2014), An R Companion to Political Analysis, Sage.
2. R Packages of note:
T. Hesterberg (Google) resample;
S. Urbanek (AT&T) rJava; D. Mimno (Cornell) mallet;
C. Signorino et al. (U. of Rochester) games;
Rstudio dplyr; ggvis;
3. Conference Posters I especially liked:
S. Kovalchik (RAND) (tennis data/stats); M. Jimichi, et al. (Kwansei Gakuin U.)
(ggplot2/ggviz of Nikkei stock market); S. Porter (Added Value) (RExcel via Windows
COM); E. Cramer, el al. (Scripps) (R w/ 60 cores and 120 concurrent threads); M. Çetikaya-
Rundel (Duke) (knitr/Rmarkdown for elem. stat. non-majors); S. Griffith (Cleveland Clinic)
(ggplot2, shiny, github/shinyIncubator viz. apps by and for HS AP stat. students)
4. New Open Educational Resources (OER) for introductory statistics
D. Diez et al. http://www.openintro.org/
Two books: classical (frequentist), contemporary (resample/simulation)
Authors: a bunch of CCC faculty http://www.openstaxcollege.org/
Target audience: H.S. AP stat (so no R…yet; still w/ TI-calculators)
5. Discussions regarding Julia (many MIT and Stanford committers)
a. Orthogonal (mostly) to R; replacement (mostly) for MATLAB; complement (again,
mostly) for NumPy; extends (mostly) C/Fortran
Presentations from JuliaCon 2014 (June) are now up on the site. See:
http://julialang.org/blog/2014/08/juliacon-opening-session
http://julialang.org/blog/2014/08/juliacon-opt-session
Applied Math/Industrial Engineering folks are early-adopters—MIPs, FFT, NLP, etc.
Optimization/Resource Allocation problems, not necessarily Predictive Modeling.