A few weeks ago I spoke at the Workshop Organized by Monash Business Analytics Team (WOMBAT), held in the Melbourne Zoo (!) on Thursday and Friday the 18th and 19th February.
It was my first time at the Melbourne Zoo, and my first time having a conference in a Zoo. It was a pretty surreal experience briskly walking to the conference room while trying to navigate a zoo, passing monkeys, macaws, and tigers. And during the lunch breaks you could sit down and chat with other conference attendees…or go and see the Orangutan show, watch the elephants get a clean, or see some Gorilla’s.
Two other colleagues from QUT also attended, Amy Cook (as a contributed speaker), and Dr. Zoé van Havre (as an invited Speaker). Amy is currently completing a Masters by research in statistics, and Zoé has just finished her PhD in Statistics and is about to complete a Post-Doc at CSIRO.
The conference was organised by Di Cook and Rob Hyndman, of the Monash Business School. Di Cook is well known for her work in visualisation and software. Di also supervised both Hadley Wickham and Yihui Xie. Hadley has improved the R experience drastically with packages ggplot2, dplyr, tidyr, and devtools. Yihui wrote the package knitr, making reproducible reporting easy and fun to do in R.
Hadley Wickham was they Keynote speaker for the conference. Hadley’s talk discussed one way to go about summarizing large datasets by fitting many models using purrr. purrr takes a functional programming approach so you emphasises the verbs in your data anyalsis. This approach means that you can avoid writing loops so that you emphasize actions rather than book keeping. I had always been told that you should avoid writing loops in R because they are slow. However, Hadley said the following about that when …read more
Source:: r-bloggers.com