Going to Predictive Analytics World NYC for Big Data and Rstats

For the week of October 16th I am going down to NYC to immerse myself in more cool classes, speakers and forums at Predictive Analytics World (PAWs). This conference brings together some of the people whose work I just love, and I know very well in some cases and not at all in others. Below are some of the highlights of the conference in my eyes which follows pretty closely to the talks and class I will be going to.

Max Kuhn, an heavy R user, will be giving an R bootcamp and a predictive analytics in R class. I will be attending at least one of these. Max has created some heavily used R packages including Caret and ODFweave. Every presentation I have seen covering the use of R in analytics competitions like Kaggle.com start with using Max's Caret Package.

Matthew Flynn who is the Director of Claim Research at Travelers in Hartford is giving a talk on creating more analytical bandwidth with R. I believe Travelers is a big SAS user which seems to match up with Matthew's bio so it will be interesting to hear his views on R particularly if it has to do with using the R connector to SAS. However, I am always excited to find another R user in Connecticut! In that light here is an open offer to Matthew or any other R user in Connecticut to join the Connecticut R users meetup, and I promise the first round will be on me.

Anthony Goldbloom, CEO of Kaggle, is giving a talk on Predictive Modeling Competitions. I have been to a number of Anthony's talks, and they are great fun. I have also been to a number of talks by people who have competed in Kaggle competitions, and the approaches and results are simply mind blowing. Kaggle has helped take Predictive Modeling to the next level. It provides a fun environment where Data scientist can push their art and skill against other talented people. Truely great stuff.

Usama Fayyad who is the CTO of ChoozOn is giving a talk on Predictive Analytics and Big Data. Given that Usama was the Chief Data Scientist at Yahoo, and I am sure that he still plays in the REALLY big data pool, I am dying to hear his approaches and views on attacking the various problems.

John Elder of Elder Research is giving a talk on the best and the worst of Predictive Analytics. I love these types of talks. When the mistakes are presented to us they are amusing, but I promise you I will not make those those mistakes in the future because I do not want to be in one of John's talks.

Robert Broughton will be giving a talk on Predictive Analytics and law enforcement. I have seen more on more articles and blog posts on this area in the last year. I believe it has huge potential to reduce crime and make the world a safer place. I am eager to hear this talk.

The are more great speakers that may interest you more than the ones that interest me, but my dance card is full and I am tired of typing so I will just give you the link to the list of speakers.