Notes from the Kölner R meeting, 6 March 2015
Using R in Excel via R.NET
Günter Faes and Matthias Spix |
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Günter and Michael presented examples of a new R Excel plugin 'Calidris' they developed using R.net. The plugin itself is written in C# and adds an R ribbon to Excel with pre-build functions.
In its current form the add-in is a proof of concept. It demonstrates in principal that functions based on R can be added to Excel. The version Günter and Michael demonstrated doesn't have a reactive functionality yet, i.e. updating a cell will not update the output of an R function automatically at the moment. Feel free to get in touch with them if you would like to know more about their project. You find their contact details on the last slide of their presentation.
Text Mining with R
Cornelius Puschmann |
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Cornelius gave an engaging high-level overview on text mining with R, covering:
- From natural language processing (NLP) to text mining
- Building corpora
- Latent semantic analysis (LSA)
- Topic models/Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA)
- Sentiment analysis
- Misc useful packages
A nice and illustrative example Cornelius presented at the end of his talk was the package
gender by Linclon Mullen that uses historical US census data to predict the gender of people based on their first name. I have several colleagues with the name of 'Leslie' or 'Lesley'. Thanks to gender I know now that my male colleagues are more likely to be spelled 'Leslie' than 'Lesley' and that a person with either name is more likely to be female.library(gender)
L1 <- gender("Leslie")
L2 <- gender("Lesley")
cbind(L1, L2)
L1 L2
name "Leslie" "Lesley"
proportion_male 0.2222 0.0995
proportion_female 0.7778 0.9005
gender "female" "female"
year_min 1932 1932
year_max 2012 2012
Drinks and Networking
No Cologne R user group meeting would be complete without drinks and schnitzel at the Lux. |
| Photo: Günter Faes |
Next Kölner R meeting
The next meeting will be Friday, 26 June. Note the new larger venue: Startplatz, Im Mediapark 5, Köln. We will have two talks:- Data Science at the Commandline (Kirill Pomogajko)
- An Introduction to RStan and the Stan Modelling Language (Paul Viefers)
Next Kölner R User Meeting: Friday, 6 March 2015
The next Cologne R user group meeting is scheduled for this Friday, 6 March 2015 and we have an exciting agenda with two talks, followed by networking drinks:
Using R in Excel via R.NET
Günter Faes and Matthias SpixMS Office and Excel are the 'de-facto' standards in many industries. Using R with Excel offers an opportunity to combine the statistical power of R with a familiar user interface. R.net offers a user friendly interfaces to Excel; R functions work just like Excel functions and are basically hidden away.
Text Mining with R
Cornelius PuschmannIn addition to the analysis of numerical data, R is increasingly attractive for processing text as well. Cornelius will give a very brief overview of common text mining techniques and their corresponding R implementations, with a focus on useful applications in the social sciences. Techniques will include corpus creation and management (package tm), latent semantic analysis (package lsa), and topic models (package topicmodels), as well as sentiment analysis (experimental package syuzhet). Simple but useful routines such as automatically inferring the language of a text (package text cat , or the gender of a first name (package genderize) will also be briefly pointed out.
Drinks and Networking
The event will be followed by drinks and schnitzel at the Lux.For further details visit our KölnRUG Meetup site. Please sign up if you would like to come along. Notes from past meetings are available here.
The organisers, Bernd Weiß and Markus Gesmann, gratefully acknowledge the sponsorship of Revolution Analytics, who support the Cologne R user group as part of their Matrix programme.
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End User Computing and why R can help meeting Solvency II
John D. Cook gave a great talk about 'Why and how people use R'. The talk resonated with me and highlighted why R is such a great tool for end user computing. A topic which has become increasingly important in the European insurance industry.
John's main point on why people use R is that R gets the job done and I think he is spot on. Of course that's the trouble with R sometimes as well, or to quote Bo again:
"The best thing about R is that it was developed by statisticians.
"The worst thing about R is that it was developed by statisticians."
Bo Cowgill, Google
Review: Kölner R Meeting 30 March 2012
The first Kölner R user meeting was great fun. About 20 useRs had turned up to exchange their ideas, questions and experience with R. Three talks about R & Excel, ggplot2 & XeLaTeX and Dynamical systems with R & simecol had kicked off the evening, with Kölsch (beer) losing our tongues further.
Thankfully a lot of people had brought along their laptops, as unfortunately we lacked a cable to connect any of the computers to the installed projector. Never-mind, we cuddled up around the notebooks and switched slides on the speakers sign.
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| Photos: Günter Faes |
Similar to LondonR, it was a very informal event. Maybe slightly forced by myself, as I called everyone by his/her first name, which could be considered rude in Germany. But what I had noticed in London, and the same was true also in Cologne, was that people with a very diverse background and of all ages would meet to discuss matters around R, often not working in the same field. So why worry about hierarchies?
Most attendees were not R experts, but users in its pure sense, trying to solve real life problems, and I suppose that makes those meetings so special. R users are often not programmers by trade, but amateurs, who have a keen interest to extract stories and pictures from their data. And for that reason the discussions are often so engaging. Talking to people using R in social science, psychology, biology, pharma, energy, telcos, finance, insurance or actually statistics opens your mind and eyes. You realise that you are not alone, other people are weird as well. They have similar problems and challenges, but may use a different domain language and look at problems from a different angle. And this can be incredibly refreshing!
Anyhow, we agreed to meet again in about three months time. The pub was a great venue to socialise, yet a bit noisy for the talks. Hopefully we can use a room at the nearby university for the presentations next time. Promises were made already. We shall see. Günter was so kind to set up a mailing list to which you can sign up here. I will continue to use this blog to provide updates on the Cologne R user group in the future and set up a public calendar as well.
Talks
Many thanks to the speakers, who dared to give the first talks and had to improvise on the spot without a projector. Please drop me a line if you would like to speak at one of the next events.
