I had a great time at the R/Finance conference in Chicago last Friday/Saturday. Some brief takeaways for me were:
From Emanuel Derman’s talk: It is is important to distinguish between theories and models. Theories live in an abstract world and for a given set of axioms they can be proven right. However, models live in the real world, are build on simplifying assumptions and are only useful until experiments/data proves them wrong.
Last Saturday I met the guys from RStudio at the R in Finance conference in Chicago. I was curious to find out what RStudio could offer. In the past I have used mostly Emacs + ESS for editing R files. Well, and what a surprise it was. JJ, Joe and Josh showed me a preview of version 0.96 of their software, which adds a close integration of Sweave and knitr to RStudio, helping to create dynamic web reports with the new R Markdown and R HTML formats more easily.