Speaking at BARUG Wednesday, August 21, 2013

I’ll be talking at the “Official” BARUG meeting Wednesday, August 21, 2013. The RSVPs look full (sorry) but I wanted to post a thanks to the organizers for considering me. If things go well I’ll see if I can post the slides later (not sure if that is useful without detailed speakers notes).My promised topic is:

Data science as an interdisciplinary exercise. Data science is often confused with big data engineering, statistics and machine learning. It is in fact a collaborative exercise requiring listening, education and consensus building. I will share my experiences (good and bad) and tricks (good and bad) using R as a platform for data science with an emphasis on topics related to my upcoming book: “Practical Data Science with R.”

Where it ended up after writing and revising the slides involves bit of general orientation on who a data scientist should expect to work with, the concepts of our book, and then a deeper dive in how to import and re-structured data using xlsx, reshape2 and sqldf (followed by some crankiness about working with actual data). Some of the SQL material may or may not end up in the book (probably in an appendix).

Related posts:

1. On Writing Technical Articles for the Nonspecialist
2. SIGACT Review of: Combinatorics the Rota Way