1/2 day of "semi-lightning" talks!

Talks on Machine Learning, Hypothesis Testing & Type 2 Errors, Reproducible Research, Parallel Computing, and Leaflet Maps in Shiny.

We will meet on Saturday October 14th at 11:00 AM in room 210 of the downtown campus of IIT. Coffee will be provided and Microsoft will generously provide Pizza from Lou Malnati's! Thanks to IIT's Stuart School of Business for providing the space.

This is a new format for CRUG and we will see how it goes! Each speaker will talk for (up to) 20 minutes with (up to) 10 minutes for questions. We hope to have code and/or .RMD files for presentations up on our github page (https://github.com/Chicago-R-User-Group) prior to the meet-up. The general theme of the talks is- "how to use R to do ???- an introduction".

The speakers and their topics are - in no particular order-

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Joan Zhang - An Application of Machine Learning using R.

In this presentation, Joan will share her personal experience at The University of Chicago Masters in Analytics program using Machine Learning to justify the conclusion of the book –“This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly” written by Harvard professors- Drs. Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff.
In this book, authors argue that domestic debt plays an important role in countries’ default and that serial default is normal throughout history and around the globe. Analysis of 89 episodes of countries’ external default data from 1827 to 2003 using model-based clustering method of unsupervised learning confirms the main points in Reinhart and Rogoff’s argument.
Joan is a Database Architect and Data Science Enthusiast working for Walgreens Booths Alliance. Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joan-zhang-449388130/

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Adam Ginensky- Do Green Jelly Beans Cause Acne?

An exposition using R of xkcd's funny and wonderful cartoon on type 2 error. We'll use the cartoon as a jump off to create R code and to understand what hypothesis testing can and can't say !

Adam Ginensky works as a consultant for statistical projects. He also teaches statistics and machine learning. He taught at the University of Chicago and at Northwestern in their masters program in analytics. He currently is an instructor at acads.org . In a previous lifetime, Adam spent 25 years as an options market maker on the floor of various exchanges including the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

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Justin M. Shea - Reproducible Research: An example using Hamilton's new alternative to the HP-filter.

Justin's Talk will examine changes in the U.S. Economy over the last few decades, applying this new filter to dozens of economic time series with a discussion on doing so using best practices in Reproducible Research. R developers have many tools at their disposal for this, both old and new, and the talk shall touch on using them in concert.

Justin is a Data Science consultant for a Chicago SaaS company. He is also an Economics adjunct faculty member at Roosevelt University. Prior to current endeavors, most of Justin’s career has been in the commodity futures trading industry. Starting as a runner on the CME floor, he steadily advanced his career, eventually becoming a Portfolio Manager for a Chicago based Commodity Trading Advisor where he used R to model portfolios of actively managed trading strategies. Justin holds a Master’s in Economics from Roosevelt University. Encouraging a view of Economics as a field ripe for exploration beyond the orthodox methods, Roosevelt's faculty have been writing about the dangers of p-hacking for over three decades.

Justin is also the author and contributor to various R packages, some of which are currently available on CRAN.

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Xuelong Wang- An introduction to Parallel Computing in R

An introduction to the foreach and parallel packages assuming no background in those packages.

Xuelong is a graduate student in statistics at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

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Gene Leynes - How to put a leaflet map into a Shiny application, using West Nile Virus data as an example.

How to put a leaflet map into a Shiny application, using West Nile Virus data as an example. https://github.com/geneorama/wnv_map_demo

Gene Leynes is a data scientist for the City of Chicago working on smart city projects that use predictive analytics to optimize city operations. His projects include food inspection violation forecasting, West Nile Virus predictions, childhood lead poisoning prevention, and various inspection optimization work. His work has been featured on PBS Newshour, the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic’s CityLab, and was presented at the 2016 UseR! conference in Stanford, CA.

Gene has been an R user for about 10 years, and making maps in R for the past 2 years. He holds a Masters of Business from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, and a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from DePaul University.

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We are leaving 30 minutes after the last talk for people to mingle and ask questions.