3 Essential R libraries, OpenAnalytics R Service Bus & a Tutorial
Details
For our September meetup we're going to dive deeper into R with two presentations by Rob James and David Dossot. The presentations will followed by another guided tutorial so please bring your laptops again.
Rob is going to introduce three libraries which many R programmers consider essential tools: ggplot2, plyr and reshape2. ggplot2 is a plotting system for R, based on the grammar of graphics (see http://en.wikipedia.o... (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leland_Wilkinson) for more details), which tries to take the good parts of base and lattice graphics and none of the bad parts. It takes care of many of the fiddly details that make plotting a hassle (like drawing legends) as well as providing a powerful model of graphics that makes it easy to produce complex multi-layered graphics. "The reshape2 package lets you flexibly restructure and aggregate data using just three functions, whereas the plyr package is kind of like a supercharged SQL "GROUP BY" statement for R data frames." (quoting http://blog.revolutio... (http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2010/09/plyr-and-reshape-better-faster-more-productive.html)) All three were created by Hadley Wickham ( http://had.co.nz/... (http://had.co.nz/))
David is going to present the R Service Bus he built for OpenAnalytics ( http://www.openanalyt... (http://www.openanalytics.eu/) https://github.com/op... (https://github.com/openanalytics/RSB)). Quoting its homepage: "
Having the right algorithm is a first big step to get advanced analytics solve your problem and inform your decisions. The next one is to have the algorithm work for you and integrate it in your workflows and business processes.
The R Service Bus is a swiss army knife that allows you to plug R into your processes independently of the technology used by other software applications involved in the workflow.
The prime objective of the R Service Bus is to smoothly integrate into your existing infrastructure and it therefore supports communication using a plethora of protocols such as
SOAP and RESTful web services various e-mail protocols folder monitoring, (s)ftp messaging protocols such a JMS or STOMP "
Again, the presentations will followed by another guided tutorial so please bring your laptops. Hope to see you all there! - Tavis