Ask HN: Using R

10 points·linhir··6 comments

I think of myself as a burgeoning statistician first and a programmer a distance second. That might just be due to my first interests, and obviously data mining, data analysis and machine learning are truly both rather than one or the other.

In the stats community, R is widely used and I wanted to know if there were any R users on HN? If so, what exciting things are you doing or have you seen with the language?

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GGplot2, by H Wickham

http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/

and the bay Area user's group

http://www.meetup.com/R-Users/calendar/10446894/

in my google reader:

http://blog.revolution-computing.com/

http://learnr.wordpress.com/

http://www.decisionstats.com/

http://anyall.org/blog/

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http://ask.metafilter.com/116762/Rrrrrgh

http://alittleknowledge.wordpress.com/2009/09/11/r-for-pedes...

and some portals:

http://planetr.stderr.org/

http://info.smu.edu.sg/rsite/

I've been using R for 4 years to analyse microarrays and to do nonlinear time series analysis on signals.

I'm using nonstandard methods based on my own code, third party command line programs and extensions I wrote in 'C'. I chose R over Matlab or Octave because it has a more powerful programming language and a nice time series datastructure.

Despite doing very little statistics for the last 2 years I'm still very happy with R. People I know who use Matlab tell me they only do it for the available libraries.

There is a huge and growing R community. I am using randomForest (originally in Fortran) package as a classifier for my dataset.

R is a great language. I have been using R for a while. However, I wonder if someone could make a free,nice,simple yet powerful user interface for R. For my fellow biologists who wants to do some data analysis,the learning curve of R is just too steep.

Rattle is a pretty nice front-end for R. Might be worth a look. http://rattle.togaware.com/

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