I mused over Test Driven Analysis on this blog before, but it was Richard Pugh’s talk on SAS to R Migration at LondonR last week that brought the topic back into my mind and clarified a few things.
Rich’s presentation focused on the challenge of how to ensure that the new system (R) would provide the same answers as the legacy system (SAS).
This is when it clicked with me: My brain is just another system as well.
I love interactive pivot tables. That is the number one reason why I keep using spreadsheet software. The ability to look at data quickly in lots of different ways, without a single line of code helps me to get an understanding of the data really fast.
Perhaps I can do the same now in R as well. At yesterday’s LondonR meeting Enzo Martoglio presented briefly his rpivotTable package. Enzo builds on Nicolas Kruchten’s PivotTable.
Last Tuesday I attended the LondonR user group meeting, where Rich and Andy from Mango argued about the better package for multivariate graphics with R: lattice vs. ggplot2.
As part of their talk they had a little competition in visualising London Underground performance data, see their slides. Both made heavy use of the respective panelling / faceting capabilities. Additionally Rich used the panel.groups argument of xyplot to fine control the content of each panel.
The useR!2013 conference in Albacete, Spain, will commence next Wednesday, 10 July, and on the day before Diego and I will give a googleVis tutorial.
The following Monday, 15 July, the first R in Insurance event will take place at Cass Business School and I am absolutely delighted with the programme and the fact that we are sold out.
On Tuesday, 16 July, the LondonR user group meets in the City, awaiting presentations by Andrie de Vries (Revolution Analytics), Rich Pugh (Mango Solutions) and Hadley Wickham (RStudio).
At the last LondonR meeting Francine Bennett from Mastodon C shared some of her experience and findings from an analysis of a large prescriptions data set of the UK’s national health service (NHS). However, it was her last slide, which I found the most thought provoking. It asked for the definition of the following term: Test-driven analysis? Francine explained that test driven development (TDD) is a concept often used in software development for quality assurance and she wondered if a similar approach could be also used for data analysis.
This evening I will talk about Dynamical systems in R with simecol at the LondonR meeting.
Thanks to the work by Thomas Petzoldt, Karsten Rinke, Karline Soetaert and R. Woodrow Setzer it is really straight forward to model and analyse dynamical systems in R with their deSolve and simecol packages.
I will give a brief overview of the functionality using a predator-prey model as an example.
This is of course a repeat of my presentation given at the Köln R user group meeting in March.
The London R user group met again last Wednesday at the Shooting Star pub. And it was busy. More than 80 people had turned up. Was it the free beer and food, sponsored by Mango, which attracted the folks or the speakers? Or the venue? James Long, who organises the Chicago R user group meetings and who gave gave the first talk that night, noted that to his knowledge only the London and Chicago R users would meet in a pub.
On 7 September 2011 I attended the London R user group meeting. It was a very good turn out with about 50 attendees at the Shooting Star, a pub close to Liverpool Street Station. The session started at 18:00 with four presentations, followed by drinks sponsored by Mango Solutions. The slides of the presentation are available on londonr.org.
The first presentation was given by Lisa Wainer from UCL Department of Security and Crime Science about crime data analysis using R.