A presentation on the history, design, and use of R. The talk will focus on companies that use and support R, use cases, where it is going, competitors, advantages and disadvantages, and resources to learn more about R. Speaker Bio Joseph Kambourakis has been the Lead Data Science Instructor at EMC for over two years. He has taught in eight countries and been interviewed by Japanese and Saudi Arabian media about his expertise in Data Science. He holds a Bachelors in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and an MBA from Bentley University with a concentration in Business Analytics.

1. The History and Use of R
Joseph Kambourakis

2. Ground Rules
• Interrupt me
• These are all my opinions and
not of EMC or Big Data
Analytics, Discovery &
Visualization Meetup
• Slides will be available

5. Joseph Kambourakis
@mouthorjoe

7. Taught Around the World

8. WPI

9. Bentley University

10. Big Data School
Source:Data Analytics Master's Degrees: 20 Top Programs

11. Sam Woolford & Dominique Haughton

12. First Got Exposed to R

13. What is
R is a free software environment for statistical
computing and graphics
A language plus a run-time environment with
graphics, a debugger, access to certain system
functions, and the ability to run programs stored
in script files

14. What is R’s Hashtag?

15. Robert Gentleman & Ross Ihaka
• R: A Language for Data Analysis and Graphics

16. Starts with S
1976 1988 1991

17. Scheme
• Lexical scoping

18. Lexical scoping
• Searches through environments
– First global
• Global is your workspace
– Second namespace of packages
• More on packages later

19. Fortran
• source: Wikipedia

20. Under the Hood

21. Open Source
• GNU General Public License
• Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any
purpose.
• Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program
works, and change it to make it do what you wish.
• Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute copies so you
can help your neighbor.
• Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and
release your improvements (and modified versions in
general) to the public, so that the whole community
benefits.
• source: GNU.org

22. R Project
• The R Foundation is a not for profit organization working in
the public interest. It has been founded by the members of
the R Development Core Team in order to
– Provide support for the R project and other innovations in
statistical computing. We believe that R has become a mature
and valuable tool and we would like to ensure its continued
development and the development of future innovations in
software for statistical and computational research.
– Provide a reference point for individuals, institutions or
commercial enterprises that want to support or interact with
the R development community.
– Hold and administer the copyright of R software and
documentation.
• source: R Project

23. Contributors

24. How it Works: Design

25. How it Works: Design
• Functional
– mean()
– plot()

26. How it Works: Design
• Interpreted language

27. How it Works: Install
• Hosted on Comprehensive R Archive Network
(CRAN)
• 54 megabytes

28. http://cran.rstudio.com/
• Download and Install R
• Precompiled binary distributions of the base system
and contributed packages, Windows and Mac users
most likely want one of these versions of R:
• Download R for Linux
• Download R for (Mac) OS X
• Download R for Windows
• R is part of many Linux distributions, you should check
with your Linux package management system in
addition to the link above.

29. How it works: Command Line

30. How it Works: Packages
• Base
– mean()
• Utils
– read.csv()
• Stats
– lm()
– sd()

31. Packages
• Mostly hosted on CRAN
• Many others hosted elsewhere
– Github
– RStudio
– Bioconductor
– RevolutionR

32. Packages
• source: http://r4stats.com/articles/popularity/

33. Top 10 Most Popular Packages
• source: Revolution Analytics Blog

35. Data Frame

36. Capabilities
• ANALYTICS
– Basic Mathematics
– Basic Statistics
– Probability Distributions
– Machine Learning
– Optimization and Mathematical Programming
– Signal Processing
– Simulation and Random Number Generation
– Statistical Modeling
– Statistical Tests
• GRAPHICS AND VISUALIZATION
– Static Graphics
– Dynamic Graphics
– Devices and Formats

37. Model & Plot

38. GUI:RStudio

41. How Does it Compare?

42. How Does it Compare?

43. How Does it Compare?
R SAS SPSS Professional MATLAB
Cost Free! Very VERY High High - $9,975 High
Documentation Yes
Very
comprehensive
OK Some examples
Training Course NA Yes Yes Yes
User interface Low Medium Best Medium
Output
Separate
commands
Automatically produce
diagnosis graph and
forecast
Totally automated
Some automated via GUI,
some specific command
Models*
Does not STL moving
average
Does not have
ARCH/GARCH + and
other moving average
models
Does not have MA &
decomposition models
Certification
Program
Yes Yes Yes

44. Commercial Support

45. Commercial Support

46. • Version 3.1.1
7/10/2014
• source
Where it’s Now?

47. Where it’s Going
Source: Revolution Analytics Blog

48. Where it’s Going: Extensions and
Interactions
• Rcpp
– Transfer from R to C++, and from C++ to R
• RLLVM
– Creates code
• H2O
– Big data package

49. The best thing about R is
that it was developed by
statisticians. The worst
thing about R is that...it
was developed by
statisticians.
Bo Cowgill

50. Good: Open Source
• So many contributors
• Free!
• Community

51. Bad: Open Source
• No customer support
• Features

52. Good: Frequent Updates
• Always new packages
• New updates and bug fixes

53. Bad: Frequent Updates
• Package updates
• R updates

54. Bad: Documentation

55. Bad:Speed
• 40 year old code

56. Bad:Speed
• Interpreted

57. Bad:Speed
• Single threaded

58. Bad: Memory
• All stored in memory

59. Soccer Example
@11tegen11

60. Congressional Approval Rating
@adamramey

61. Source: fun with R

63. Use Cases 4

64. How to Learn:

65. How to Learn:

66. How to Learn: RStudio
How to Learn:

67. How to Learn: Data CampHow to Learn:

68. How to Learn:
Springer Series

69. How to Learn:
Art of R
Programming

70. How to Learn: Boot Camp
Boston Predictive Analytics Meetup

71. How to Learn: Online Videos

72. Web Resources:

73. Web Resources:

74. Web Resources:

75. UseR Groups & Conferences

76. Closing Thoughts

77. Thank You

78. Thank You

79. Questions
?