Data Analysts Captivated by R’s Power
Posted on January 13, 2009 Comments (1)
Data Analysts Captivated by R’s Power
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Close to 1,600 different packages reside on just one of the many Web sites devoted to R, and the number of packages has grown exponentially. One package, called BiodiversityR, offers a graphical interface aimed at making calculations of environmental trends easier.
Another package, called Emu, analyzes speech patterns, while GenABEL is used to study the human genome. The financial services community has demonstrated a particular affinity for R; dozens of packages exist for derivatives analysis alone. “The great beauty of R is that you can modify it to do all sorts of things,” said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. “And you have a lot of prepackaged stuff that’s already available, so you’re standing on the shoulders of giants.”
R first appeared in 1996, when the statistics professors Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman of the University of Auckland in New Zealand released the code as a free software package. According to them, the notion of devising something like R sprang up during a hallway conversation. They both wanted technology better suited for their statistics students, who needed to analyze data and produce graphical models of the information. Most comparable software had been designed by computer scientists and proved hard to use.
R is another example of great, free, open source software. See R packages for Statistics for Experimenters.
via: R in the news
Related: Mistakes in Experimental Design and Interpretation – Data Based Decision Making at Google – Freeware Math Programs – How Large Quantities of Information Change Everything
Categories: Engineering, Math, Research, Students
Tags: computer science, data, Engineering, Math, open source, programming, Research, Science, Universities, usability
One Response to “Data Analysts Captivated by R’s Power”
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January 9th, 2015 @ 11:21 am
R is a fantastic language and a great tool for all data analysts.