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Tag: R programming

R Users Need To Study SAS Programming As Well, Here’s Why

Posted on by Imarticus Learning

When it comes to the IT industry, there are a number of debates, regarding various gadgets, operating systems, applications and so on. There is also one lesser-known debate, which takes place quite often in specific IT circles. This is the debate between SAS Programming and R Programming, two of the most popular and highly preferred tools in the data analytics industry.

The field of data analytics deals with great amounts of data in the virtual space, which is generated by companies, across different fields. While both of these data analytics tools, perform very similar functions, one very essential distinction between them is, that R Programming is an open source software, whereas SAS is a paid, licensed software. As there is a huge demand for highly skilled professionals in the field of data analytics, a lot of institutes have begun to offer courses in R and SAS training.

While R is an open sourced software, which means that it can easily be downloaded. This easy access is what has made it so popular in the data analytics field. While it is true that R can do everything that SAS can do, which is the opening argument of a lot of R users; it is also important to note that softwares like SPSS can also do what both R and SAS can do. While SAS Programming is a paid licensed product, R is free and this why it is believed to better than any other data analytics tool. This may be true in some aspects, where R users get to experience all the new and updated techniques whereas it takes a while for SAS Programming to assimilate them.

Think of it as a windows versus linux argument, where although Linux does everything similar to Microsoft, yet does not really have that much credibility in terms of the official usage. When R users opt for SAS training, they get to learn the not only the oldest tool in the market, but also a software that has been used as a default software in many companies for the past three decades now.

SAS Programming training will equip a professional to cover almost all the areas of statistical analysis and techniques. The fact that it is a licensed product, users can be sure that all the new additional changes are thoroughly tested by the support center.

R users getting trained in SAS would be able to handle large databases without any glitches like memory errors or becoming unresponsive. SAS is designed as a data manipulation language, which means that it can run intuitively and is very easy to learn, this would be a fresh change from the fact that R is more difficult to learn.

Although there are a lot of reasons why one would prefer R, mainly because it is free, can be updated, and has a huge community where one can find out problems, but it cannot be SAS.

This programming language is already a default software in a lot of companies, most of them do not even use it for analytics purposes. SAS provides a great support base, guarantee and is best tool to us in the long run. Hence it becomes a necessity for R users to try and master the skills of SAS programming.

 

R – What’s in it for me?

Posted on by Imarticus Learning

R is a programming language widely used in data analytics, research and statistical computing. It can be used to retrieve, clean, analyze, visualize data, which makes it a hot choice of data analysts, statisticians and researchers. What makes R so popular is the ease of presenting the results as a presentation or a document.

Its syntax is very expressive, and its interface is very user-friendly which increases its popularity year after year. Here is why you should learn R and what is in it for you. Considered as one of the best tools for data scientists, R is considered as the bridging language of data science.

According to the survey conducted by O’Reilly Media in 2014 to learn about the popular tools among the data scientists, R turned out to be the most popular amongst the programming languages.

Why is R Used in Graphics and Statistical Computing?

  1. R Programming is an Open Source

Most of the R packages are licensed under GNU General Public license terms and you can download it for free and use them even for commercial purposes

  1. Cross-Platform Interoperability

In today’s technology-driven world, it is very important for any program to be flexible and adaptable. The ability to be able to run on popular platforms like Windows, Mac, and Linux makes R a popular choice.

  1. Career Prospects

Data science training and proficiency in R is highly desirable for software job openings. It makes you stand out from the crowd when you apply for a job.

  1. Popular Programme Among Tech Giants

Popularity and preference among tech giants show the potential of a programming language. R exhibits great potential this way. Better data analytics makes R a hot choice for many companies to aid them in the decision-making process. Learning R thus increases your chances to work with market leaders.

Companies Using R

As mentioned earlier, R is the hot choice amongst the market leaders. Listed below are some examples of renowned R users and an indication on how it helps them.

  1. Facebook – To analyze user behavior by considering profile pictures and status updates.
  2. Google – To enhance the effectiveness of ads and economic forecasting.
  3. Twitter – To visualize the data and for semantic clustering
  4. Microsoft – Uses R for a myriad of purposes that it eventually acquired Revolution R company!
  5. Uber – To analyze various user statistics
  6. Airbnb – To scale data science.
  7. IBM – The extensive application of R made them join R Consortium Group
  8. ANZ – To create and analyze credit risk modeling.

Real-World Application of R Programming

  1. Data Science

R programming facilitates real-time data collection and thus, makes it an extremely useful tool for data scientists. They can perform predictive as well as statistical analysis with these data. It also helps to create visualizations and to effectively communicate the results to respective stakeholders.

  1. Statistical Computing

R is very simple highly user-friendly that even a non-computer professional can import data from requisite sources and analyze them to create better results. The excellent charting capability of R program helps you to create good visualizations also has charting capabilities, which means you can plot your data and create outstanding visualizations from a given dataset.

  1. Machine Learning

R programming has found its application in machine learning as well. Machine learning professionals use R to implement the algorithms in various fields including marketing, finance, retail marketing, genetics research, and healthcare to mention some.

Conclusion

Most suited for graphics, statistical analysis and data visualization R is the most desirable tool that is leading the world of computer programming. One of the most preferred programs by the market giants, Learning R offers better career prospects.

The Promises of Artificial Intelligence: Introduction

Posted on by Imarticus Learning

The field of Artificial Intelligence seems to working on a winning streak. In the year 2005, the U. S Defence Advance Research Project Agency, held the DARPA Grand Challenge, which was supposedly held to spur development of autonomous vehicles, basically in order to make self-driven, smart cars. This challenge was taken up and successfully completed by 5 teams. In the year 2011, in a great competition of Jeopardy, the IBM Watson system, was successfully able to beat two long time, human champions of the same legendary game. Another great win of technology over the human race would be in the year 2016, when Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo system was able to successfully defeat the world champion of Go Player, who was reportedly the world champion for 18 consecutive times.
While these feats of technology over the human brain are extremely commendable, today the long surviving dream of humans, which basically revolved around developing technology to control their surroundings, has finally come to fruition. This has resulted in the form of Google’s Google Assistant, Microsoft’s Cortana, Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa. As a result of all of these AI (Artificial Intelligence) powered virtual assistants, people are able to make greater use of technology in order to live better lives.
Artificial Intelligence is considered to be a field of computer science, which is entirely devoted to the creation of computing machines and systems, all of which are able to perform operations that are similar to human learning and decision making. According to the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, AI is, “the scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behaviour and their embodiment in machines.” While these intelligence levels can never be compared to those of the humans, but they can certainly vary in terms of various technologies.
Artificial Intelligence includes a number of functions, which include learning, which primarily includes a number of approaches such as deep learning, transfer learning, human learning and especially decision making. All of these functionalities can later help in the execution of various fields such as cardiology, accounting, law, deductive reasoning, quantitative reasoning, and mainly interactions with people, in order to not only perform tasks, but also to learn from the environment.
While the recent changes may be extremely mind blowing, the promise of AI has always been existing since era of electromechanical computing, this began in the time period, after the World War 2. The first conference of Artificial Intelligence was held at the college of Dartmouth in the year 1956 and at that time, it was said that AI could be achieved within the time period of summer. Later on, in the 1960’s there were scientists, who claimed that in the next decade, it would be possible to see various machines controlling human lives. But it was in the year 1965, when the Nobel Laureate, Herbert Simon, who is supposed to have predicted the words, which would have some substance and which were, “In the next 20 years, it would be possible that machines would be able to do any work of labour that man can”.
With Artificial Intelligence, going in full fervour, the field which it has affected most in the field of Data Science. And as there are many who believe that there is a great to achieve in this field, have begun to get trained in the same by approaching professional training institute – Imarticus Learning.

How Does Facebook Identify Where You Are From Your Profile Photo?

Posted on by Imarticus Learning

We all know that Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook is strongly passionate about Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, but how has that impacted our everyday online social life?
You may think you’re just uploading a photo, but facebook knows how many people are there, whether you’re outside or inside, and if you’re smiling.
The technology that Facebook uses, Artificial Intelligence, is a rigorous science that focuses on designing systems that make use of algorithms that are much similar to that of our human brain. AI learns to recognize patterns from large amounts of data and come up with a comprehensive conclusion.

What does that have to do with how Facebook knows if I’m smiling or not?

Facebook is constantly teaching their machines to work better. By using deep learning, they train AI to structure through various processing layers and understanding an abstract representation of what the data could be. By using their system called “convolutional neural network”, the computer is able to go through layers of units and understand whether there is a dog in a photo.

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Facebook works through layers. In the first layer, it is able to identify the edges of objects. In the second layer, it is able to detect combinations and identify it to be an eye in a face or a window in a plane. The next layer combines these further and identifies them to be either an entire face or a wing on a plane. The final layer is able to further detect these combinations and identifies if it is a person or a plane.
The network needs to be able to read the labels on the database and identify which of these are labeled as humans or plants. The system learns to associate the input with the label. The way facebook works is that it is able to now identify not only that there are humans in a photo, but how many humans, whether they are indoors or outdoors, and their actions, i.e. if they are sitting or standing.
However, a photograph that has been uploaded may need to be completely zoomed in for Facebook’s AI to understand intricacies if a person is smiling or not.

It may not always be perfect in its recognition, but it’s getting there.
A lot of information can be extracted from a photograph. Facebook is only going to get better with its AI and making use of big data.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning is a concept that will be looked at in Imarticus’s Data Science Prodegree. This course is a cutting-edge program designed and delivered in collaboration with Genpact, a leader in Analytics solutions. Students get their hands-on learning with 6 industry projects and work with industry mentors.

Written by Tenaz Shanice Cardoz, Marketing & Communications.

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Advantages Of R Programming Language

Posted on by Imarticus Learning

R is a programming language, mainly dealing with the statistical computation of data and graphical representations. Many data science experts claim that R can be considered as a very different application, of its licensed contemporary tool, SAS. This data analytics tool was developed at Bell Laboratories, by John Chambers and his colleagues.
The various offerings of this tool include linear and non-linear modeling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, clustering, and graphical representation. It can be referred to as a more integrated suite of software facilities, for the purpose of data manipulation, calculation and data visualization. The R environment is more of a well-developed space for an R programming language, inclusive of user-defined recursive functions as well as input and output facilities. Since it is a relatively new data analytics tool in the IT-sphere, it is still considered to be very popular amongst a lot of data enthusiasts.

There are a number of advantages of this data analytics tool, which make it so very popular amongst Data Scientists. Firstly, the fact that it is by far the most comprehensive statistical analysis package available totally works in its favor. This tool strives to incorporate all of the standard statistical tests, models, and analyses as well as provides for an effective language so as to manage and manipulate data.
One of the biggest advantages of this tool is the fact that it is entirely open sourced. This means that it can be downloaded very easily and is free of cost. This is mainly the reason why there are also communities, which strive to develop the various aspects of this tool. Currently, there are about some 19 developers, including practicing professionals from the IT industry, who help in tweaking out this software. This is also the reason why most of the latest technological developments, are first to arrive on this software before they are seen anywhere else.

Why Learn R Programming

When it comes to a graphical representation, the related attributed to R are extremely exemplary. This is the reason why it is able to surpass most of the other statistical and graphical packages with great ease. The fact that it has no license restrictions, makes it literally the go-to software, for all of those who want to practice this in the earlier stages. It has over 4800 packages available, in its environment which belong to various repositories with specialization in various topics like econometrics, data mining, spatial analysis, and bioinformatics.
The best part about R programming is that it is more of a user-run software, which means that anyone is allowed to provide code enhancements and new packages. The quality of great packages on the R community environment is a testament to this very approach to developing certain software by sharing and encouraging inputs. This tool is also compatible across platforms and thereby it runs on many operating systems as well as hardware.
It can function with similar clarity for both the Linux as well as Microsoft Windows Operating Systems. In addition to this, the fact that R can also work well with other data analytics tools like SAS, SPSS and MySQL, have resulted in a number of takers for this data analytics tool. Imarticus Learning The Data Science Prodegree powered by KPMG is one such course which offers both SAS and R along with the opportunity to be a Data Scientist at KPMG.

Basics About Topic Modelling As A Data Analytics Technique

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The Data Science industry has brought about various new avenues into the world of business and internet of things. Here, data analytics as a field, basically deals with extracting ‘information’ from all the obtained data. With rapid digitalization and increasing of the boundaries of the virtual world, the generation and availability of data is on an all-time high. While some of this data might be pre-processed and structured, most of it is just not structured at all. This causes a lot of difficulties when it comes to the part, where relevant and important information is required. That’s where the tools and technologies of the data analytics industry come into play. These are powerful methods, developed by technology and can be used for sifting through the volumes of data and sniffing out, exactly what a professional is looking for. One of the subsets of these technology is the field of text mining, which basically deals with the technique known as Topic Modelling.
This process mainly deals with, identifying topics present in a text object and deriving hidden patterns automatically, thus aiding in the betterment of decision making. This process differs from other run of the mill text mining approaches, which basically deal with regular search techniques or keywords searching techniques based on any random dictionary. A specific bunch of words that is supposed to be found and observed by a professional, is known as “topics”, which usually are present in large clusters of texts. Topic modelling is the unsupervised approach to performing the above mentioned action, with only the machine and no manual help.
Data Science CourseTopics in other words are, “a pattern of co-occuring terms in a corpus, which keeps repeating itself”. For instance

while building a topic model for healthcare, it should be devised in such a way that it results in words like, health, doctor, patient, hospital and other related words. These topic models are very useful when it comes to processes such as, document clustering, organizing large blocks of textual data, feature selection and retrieval of information from unstructured text and so on. What makes this technique so very important is that it can be used in almost any field from print media to marketing and still be relevant and product centric. For example, there are top gun newspaper publishing houses like, The New York Times, who have a team working on perfecting topic models so as to boost their article recommendations for users. There are a lot of advanced HR teams dabbling in this sector by trying to use it to match perfect candidates, with perfect job profiles
These text models are also used in various other applications such as organization of large datasets of emails, customer reviews and user social media profiles. These are some of the reasons why professionals specializing in this technique are gradually becoming sought after. As the demand of companies rises, the amount of people opting to get trained in these techniques also goes up. Imarticus Learning has various industry intensive course offerings for various data analytics tools like Python, which uses this topic modeling technique most extensively.

 

Pokémon Go – Why is it so popular?

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Pokémon was originally an animation show by The Pokémon Company and was aired in the year the year 1995. It began as a game on the ‘Gameboy’ and was soon turned into an animated franchise by the combined efforts of Nintendo, Creatures and Game Freak. Since day 1, this show had garnered immense popularity, and at the height of its fame, had scores of teenagers as its viewers.
Recently, Nintendo launched Pokémon Go as a mobile application, thus bringing together a clever marketing ploy, a health benefiting agenda and made optimum use of the nostalgia attached to the franchise.
pokemon-go-office
Pokémon Go is fast becoming the most sought after application today. Here is some fascinating data we have found so far:

  • In U.S.A alone there have been more than 60% of people downloading the app.
  • This proves that more than 3% of Android users in USA are using this application on a daily basis, nearing the usage of Twitter.
  • People have no problem with the data usage of this app, which is believed to be a lot owing to the graphics. Surprisingly this is not the case, as data analytic experts claim it does even use data as much as Google Maps.
  • Pokémon Go has more than 10 million users already and the number is definitely bound to increase!
  • This application has achieved the most amount of data retention, in just weeks of its launch and has clearly stood out at the standard time a user takes to dislike an app; which in this case, is almost negligible.
  • The fact that there are a number of data analytics in terms of the audience targeted, the age groups, the trends and the fact that this app is literally bringing people out of their houses.
  • Pokémon Go seems to have taken over the world with being downloaded in countries where the app hasn’t even been officially released yet. Appkmirror which a secondary site to download the app has had almost 4 million visits since the launch.

If the stats are to be believed, then Pokémon Go certainly seems to be taking over the world. This presents an incredible opportunity to various firms to invest in this application, as well as to generate more sales, through luring customers to their outlets.

Apart from the primary glitches like the server rundowns, people getting hurt, trespassing or disrespecting a solemn site, this application still seems to be going strong.
Data Analytics will play a major role in further development of the app, thus adding more impetus to career prospects of a Data Scientist.
Imarticus Learning is a reputed education institute, providing a host of courses in the renowned field of Data Analytics and the tools used here, like SAS, R programming, Hadoop and others.

Written by Imarticus Team