Johannesburg R User Group - August 2018

The agenda
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• Start at 11:00

• 11:00 - 11:10 Welcome

• 11:15 – 11:40 Talk 1: Colin Phillips discussing Purrr (25 minutes)

• 11:45 - 11:55 Short break

• 12:00 - 12:25 Talk 2: Jess Rees discussing new data visualizations such as productplots (25 minutes)

• 12:30 - 12:45 Talk 3: Brett Rowland discussing getting started with Shiny (25 minutes)

• Finish at 12:50

More details on each talk
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• Talk 1: The purrr package is a toolkit of useful functional programming tools for R. It allows you to write code that is more consistent, more compact, and easier to read and write. Colin will review the conceptual framework that purrr provides with a few worked examples, to motivate for including purrr in your data science workflow.

• Talk 2: Jess will be going through some of the lesser-known R visualisation packages, and showing how they can be used to create useful, insightful views of different data sets. The main focus will be on product plots.

• Talk 3: Brett Rowland will be going through how to use Shiny as a tool to visualise model output results.

Speakers Bios
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• Colin Phillips: Studied Operations Research at Wits. He works in the Data Science Lab at Discovery, with a particular focus on optimisation problems in operations. R is his go-to tool for most data wrangling, modelling and analysis work.

• Jess Rees: Studied Computer Science and Statistics at UCT, before joining Discovery in 2017 as a Data Scientist in the Data Science Lab. She is currently completing her Masters through Tuks, with her dissertation being on studying the application of complex network theory to chains of workflow processes.

• Brett Rowland: Studied Actuarial Science and Statistics at Tuks, joined Discovery in 2018 as a Data Scientist in the Data Science Lab. He is currently working on predicting the onset of chronic diseases in the Discovery member base.