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.

Resources to Learn R for new users

Historically R has a very steep learning curve, and there are many people who have become frustrated and given up before they achieved their goal of getting their R skills up to the level they need to make R useful to them in their field of interest. I am often asked to provide training to new R users which my current company and my previous company both do. In fact there are many companies that provide R training, and do an excellent job of it. The problem is this type of training is designed for a larger group of people and is simply not affordable for the single R user who wants to start with R or improve their skills.

There are some great books that can start you off in R. I actually learned R using the Baseball Hacks book by Joseph Adler which was a fun way to get me to the level I needed. I also know a number of people who started with R by using the R in a Nutshell also by Joseph Adler. While I have used this book in more recent times and have found it very helpful. Recently the R Cookbook by Paul Teetor has been recommended as a great way to start learning R. Again I have heard nothing but good things but this book. I have also heard that using Rstudio helps to speed up the process of learning R.

Also the R users groups are a good resource for help getting started in R. The Greater Boston R user group does a presentation before the main talk of the evening at each one of its meetups dedicated to addressing the needs of newer users. The slides for these talks are on their meetup site. A number of the people I have worked with used R-Help as a tool to assist them in learning R. I tried this a little when I started and it was not really helpful for me, but for people with other styles of learning it may be great.

If you are a member of ASA the  various chapter periodically do introduction to R training for a very low cost. A few months back the Boston chapter of the ASA did a one day introduction to R for around $25.

Recently David Smith of REvolution Analytics announced a series on online training courses for about $400 . There  are various training classes offered at industry conferences like Predictive Analytics World. You should expect to pay anywhere from $400 to $1,200 for a training class at these events. If you go to the New York Predictive Analytics Newbie R Training in October the instructor is Max Kuhn. You could not pick a better R instructor than Max.

I wish there where more resources out there to help the new R users along. I think choosing to approach R through a book or an introductory training class really depends on how you most effectively learn. I do believe that regardless of the path you choose installing Rstudio will help a great deal in your effort.

I know there have to be other helpful resources out there. If anyone knows of one please either email me or add a comment here, and I will add them to this post.