Revolution Newsletters: Issue 27 - April 2012

Welcome to the April edition of the Revolution Newsletter, now in its third year! Every month, we bring you the latest news about R from Revolution Analytics and around the Web. We include tips and tricks on using R, events of interest to the R community, and information about products and initiatives from the team at Revolution Analytics. This newsletter is for you, so let us know what you think — send us feedback at my email address below. If you find this newsletter valuable, forward it to your friends. And if you've received this newsletter from a friend, you can subscribe here to get your own copy each month. Enjoy!

Your editor,
David Smith, VP Marketing and Community
david@revolutionanalytics.com
Twitter: @revodavid

	2012 Spring Webinar Series
Our Spring Webinar Series features presentations from Revolution Analytics staff and thought leaders in predictive analytics and Big Data. Don't miss webinars coming soon on Big Data with R and Hadoop, integrating R with MS Office, spatial statistics with, data mining with R, retail marketing analytics, a graduate certificate program in R, and much more. See our webinar schedule for full details. Registration is free, but attendance is limited -- sign up soon to claim your seat for the live presentation.

Revolution News
Every month, we bring you the latest news about Revolution's products and events in this section. Follow us on Twitter at @RevolutionR for up-to-the-minute news and updates from Revolution Analytics!

Using Revolution R Enterprise with the IBM Netezza appliance, you can build powerful predictive models for Big Data using using Naive Bayes and Classification Trees, as shown in this demonstration video.

Revolution Analytics' Senior Advisor for Products and Strategy Norman Nie shares Five Benefits of Big Analytics in the 2012 SAP Sybase Capital Markets Guide.

If you missed any of our recent webinars, catch our on-demand replays to see: how R was used to analyze when banks should modify distressed home loans; how R is used for actuarial analysis at Deloitte Consulting; and how to make model results more impactful.

Revolution Analytics is proud to sponsor R/Finance 2012, the premier conference devoted to applied financial analysis using R. Register now for two-days of in-depth presentations May 11-12 in Chicago, including David Humke (Northern Trust) who will speak on Operational Risk Measurement with R and RevoScaleR.

The annual Future of Open Source Survey (sponsored by the 451 Group, Revolution Analytics and other open-source firms) tracks opinions and trends on the use of open-source software in commercial organizations. Please take 5 minutes to provide your input. The conclusions from the 2011 survey are available here.

R News, Tips and Tricks from the Revolutions blog
The Revolutions blog brings you daily news and tips about R, statistics and open source. Here are some highlights from Revolutions from the past month.

Hadley Wickham reveals new features in the latest version of the ggplot2 package, including choropleths, violin plots, and improved annotations.

R user Anthony Damico has created a series of sixty two-minute R tutorials -- a great resources for beginners getting started with R.

An text analysis using R of scripts from the 'Downton Abbey' series reveals overuse of some anachronistic phrases (for example "black market" wasn't widely used until WW2).

This beautiful animated visualization of wind-flow patterns wasn't created with R, but you can create something similar with vector plots.

To simplify working with times and dates in R, check out these tips on using the "lubridate" package.

The new "Easter Beagle" release of the 2.15.0 contains several new features that will appear in Revolution R Enterprise in the future

Upcoming Events
Every month, we highlight some upcoming events from R Community Calendar.

April 17: The Greater Boston R User Group features a presentation on seamless R and C++ integration; Denver has a meeting on Bayesian Data Analysis in R, and Portland discusses "propensity score matching" in R.
April 18: The Canberra R Users Group shares best practices for R code management, and Seattle compares the R and Julia languages.
April 19: The Turin R User Group has a free introductory course on R; in Kassel there's a presentation on interactive graphics with R; and there's a meetup for R users in the Raleigh-Durham area.
April 20: In Singapore, David Smith (Revolution Analytics) speaks on the Future of Big Data Analytics.
April 21: The Dallas R User Group features a presentation on portfolio analysis with R.
April 23: The Montreal R User Group discusses quantile regression with R.
April 24: The Adelaide R Users Group has a presentation on combining R and LaTeX with Sweave; in Sydney there's an introduction to mapping and geospatial analysis in R; and Vancouver looks at calling R from Python.
April 26: There is an R user group meeting in Madrid.
April 27: The Atlanta R user group shares tips on building your own R package.
April 28: The global Data Science Hackathon is a great opportunity for R users to have fun and win prizes. User groups in Boston, Chicago, Melbourne and elsewhere around the world are taking part.
May 1: The Sydney Users of R Forum hosts an online R course self-study group, and a meetup is planned in the Cincinnati area.
May 8: The Milan R User Group hosts its first meeting.

There are new R user groups in Milan, Montreal, Lithuania, Birmingham and Taiwan. Please let us know if we're missing your R user group. If you're interested in starting a local R user group in your area, Revolution Analytics offers sponsorships for both new and established groups—and has published some tips for starting a new R user group.