Welcome, WISER!

Xiaojun Sun
Sep 25, 2014

WISE and R Language

As a WISE student, we study a lot of econometric, statistical and financial models.

As a WISE student, you need to handle a lot of data when you write thesis.

As a WISE student, you are asked to do a lot of data analysis when you get a job at securities company.

……

You need a tool.

R, SAS, Matlab, Stata, SPSS, C, C++, C#, Java, Python …

Which one to choose ? ? ?

You need to be saved by

What's R?

R is a free software programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics.

The R language is widely used among statisticians and data miners for developing statistical software and data analysis.Polls and surveys of data miners are showing R's popularity has increased substantially in recent years.

What's R? (cont'd)

R is an implementation of the S programming language combined with lexical scoping semantics inspired by Scheme. S was created by John Chambers while at Bell Labs.

R was created by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and is currently developed by the R Development Core Team.

R is named partly after the first names of the first two R authors and partly as a play on the name of S.

The R environment is easily extended through a packaging system on CRAN.

What's R? (cont'd)

R Homepage

R Language Features

90 second video for an introduction to R

What is R? - InsideR

R resources on the Web - InsideR

R-info on StackOverflow

Why choose R?

Seven facts about the growth of R:

R is the highest paid IT skill (Dice.com survey, January 2014)
R is most-used data science language after SQL (O'Reilly survey, January 2014)
R is used by 70% of data miners (Rexer survey, October 2013)
R is #15 of all programming languages (RedMonk language rankings, January 2014)
R growing faster than any other data science language (KDNuggets survey, August 2013)
R is the #1 Google Search for Advanced Analytics software (Google Trends, March 2014)
R has more than 2 million users worldwide (Oracle estimate, February 2012)

Why choose R? (cont'd)

The proportion of data miners using R is rapidly growing, and since 2010, R has been the most-used data mining tool. While R is frequently used along with other tools, an increasing number of data miners also select R as their primary tool. ——-2013 Data Miner Survey, Rexer Analytics

Insights from R Users

The Popularity of Data Analysis Software by Robert A. Muenchen

Why choose R? (cont'd)

Number of posts per software on each forum on 2/10/2013.

forum

Why choose R? (cont'd)

Number of R packages plotted for each major release of R.

packages

Why choose R? (cont'd)

BIG DATA

A popular solution plan is RHadoop.

R + Hadoop –> RHadoop –> Big Data Analysis

RHadoop is a collection of five R packages that allow users to manage and analyze data with Hadoop.

What R can do?

WISE R Club

A study group in WISE set up by Xiaojun Sun and Xi Liu in Jun 20, 2014. It's a place where you can find people to learn R tegother with. It's free and self-motivated.

We are strongly supported by Kun Ren, a WISE12MA, a big R fan and an excellent R developer.

Now we have a new menber, Hongguang Deng, join us. Welcome!

I hope it become a long-lived study group at WISE as long as R is lived and vibrant.