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Business Intelligence: R U Ready?
With the growing interest in being able to squeeze information out “Big Data”, statistical analysis is being put into the spotlight. One tool that is rapidly growing in popularity is called the “R Programming Language”. R is an Open Source Programming language, and the thing that is getting people excited about it is that it is exceptionally good at being able to analyze huge data sets. It is a GNU-based project and it has parallels with the S Statistical Programming language. It is a framework for statistical modeling and analysis.
R was launched via an academic paper in 1993 at the University of Aukland by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman (the R’s behind the language name). It has since become the tool of choice for large scale statistical analysis by academics, scientists and programmers. There are roughly two million users of the R language now. R is beginning to be integrated into proprietary software. Oracle, IBM and SAS, for example, all offer some sort of support for R. And some small companies like Revolution Analytics have spring up which base their complete business model around the R language, providing both software and services.
The success of R in the academic world has spread to the world of Business Intelligence. R is especially good at an area of statistics called predictive analytics. It is useful for identifying trends and patterns from very large data sets. Predictive analytics is used in the fields of retail, financial services, pharmaceuticals, life sciences and others. It was used by Wal-Mart to understand the habits and needs of their customers in developing their winning pricing model.
David Smith of Revolution Analytics gave an example of the speed of the R language. He said that “the FAA publishes a data set that contains every commercial airline take off and landing between 1987 and 2008. That’s more than 13 gigabytes of data. By analyzing that data, we can figure out the likelihood of airline delays in one second.”
Business Intelligence is one area that is changing and developing very quickly. It looks like R may play a defining role in a large amount of that new development.
