About Visualization – comments on the last Barcelona R User Group Meetup at itnig

Fruit de la col·laboració d’itnig amb el grup d’usuaris d’R, ens van demanar si podríem escriure al seu bloc sobre el grup i com havia anat la reunió de la setmana passada sobre ggplot2. Vam decidir que seria una entrada conjunta al bloc d’itnig i al de rugbcn.

A continuació, el text complet on explico en anglès què és R, de què va el grup d’usuaris d’R de Barcelona i sobre la reunió de dimecres passat.

Last Wednesday took place a regular meeting of the Barcelona R user group community at itnig. This time, the topic was visualization and the talk was given by Jordi Puigdellivol, Data Scientist at AIA.

First things first, what is R?

R is a domain specific programming language that provides a wide variety of statistical, graphical, data manipulation, data modeling, reporting and machine learning techniques that has become an essential tool for Data Scientist at businesses, public administration and academia.

R is open source and is highly extensible, with more than 6000 packages at the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN), and this number is increasing every day. Companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft and twitter use R for they data analysis day to day work and have done several contributions to the R project.

For some fancy video explaining how cool R is in the Data Analysis world, you can watch this promotional video: R: The most powerful and most widely used statistical software

Right now, there are many online resources where you can learn R. The Try R Course at CodeSchool or the Statistical Learning Course at Stanford University are some of them. You could also join the R User Group Barcelona (RUGBCN) and learn in person with other R users and share your doubts and/or your expertise.

As I was saying, last week week it took place one of our in person meetings, where Jordi Puigdellivol talked about ggplot2. It is an implementation of the grammar of graphics in R. It combines a powerful theory to build any plot you can think about in a easy and nice way. Jordi made an exploratory analysis with fake Facebook data and diamonds data using ggplot2 to get some insights and show how to use ggplot2 package. As always, an important part of the meeting was networking and sharing our expertise about R, data analysis and some statistical and machine learning ideas. You can see Jordi’s presentation with a lot of examples and you could also visit the ggplot2 website for more information, documentation and examples.

What is RUGBCN about?

Barcelona R user group (RUGBCN) is an open R user community for the Barcelona area. Both online and in person at regular meetings, we aim to provide community support to Barcelona R users, facilitate collaborations, share tips, tricks and ideas, provide presentations on R projects and workshops on R topics or packages. The group is multilingual, informal and professional. All levels of R-saaviness are welcome. Meetings are scheduled through meetup and are held at itnig. Several companies value what we do and sponsor our meetings. We are very grateful to itnig, Estrella Damm,Revolutions Analytics and O’Reilly Media for their support.

This post was also published at itnig blog.