I’ve recently delivered a three-day intensive short-course on Scala for statistical computing and data science. The course seemed to go well, and the experience has convinced me that Scala should be used a lot more by statisticians and data scientists for a range of problems in statistical computing. In particular, the simplicity of writing fast … Continue reading Statistical computing with Scala free on-line course
Introduction This weekend I’ve been preparing some material for my upcoming Scala for statistical computing short course. As part of the course, I thought it would be useful to walk through how to think about and structure MCMC codes, and in particular, how to think about MCMC algorithms as infinite streams of state. This material … Continue reading MCMC as a Stream
Introduction People regularly ask me about books and other resources for getting started with Scala for statistical computing and data science. This post will focus on books, but it’s worth briefly noting that there are a number of other resources available, on-line and otherwise, that are also worth considering. I particularly like the Coursera course … Continue reading Books on Scala for statistical computing and data science
Introduction To statisticians and data scientists used to working in R, the concept of a data frame is one of the most natural and basic starting points for statistical computing and data analysis. It always surprises me that data frames aren’t a core concept in most programming languages’ standard libraries, since they are essentially a … Continue reading Data frames and tables in Scala
Introduction To statisticians and data scientists used to working in R, the concept of a data frame is one of the most natural and basic starting points for statistical computing and data analysis. It always surprises me that data frames aren’t a core concept in most programming languages’ standard libraries, since they are essentially a … Continue reading Data frames and tables in Scala
Introduction In a previous post I looked at how to call Scala code from R using a CRAN package called jvmr. This package now seems to have been replaced by a new package called rscala. Like the old package, it requires a pre-existing Java installation. Unlike the old package, however, it no longer depends on … Continue reading Calling Scala code from R using rscala
Introduction In a previous post I looked at how to call Scala code from R using a CRAN package called jvmr. This package now seems to have been replaced by a new package called rscala. Like the old package, it requires a pre-existing Java installation. Unlike the old package, however, it no longer depends on … Continue reading Calling Scala code from R using rscala
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Nicolas, Patrick R. (2014) Scala for Machine Learning, Packt Publishing: Birmingham, UK. Full disclosure: I received a free electronic version of this book from the publisher for the purposes of review. There is clearly a market for a good book about using Scala for statistical computing, machine learning and data science. So when the publisher … Continue reading Scala for Machine Learning [book review]
Nicolas, Patrick R. (2014) Scala for Machine Learning, Packt Publishing: Birmingham, UK. Full disclosure: I received a free electronic version of this book from the publisher for the purposes of review. There is clearly a market for a good book about using Scala for statistical computing, machine learning and data science. So when the publisher … Continue reading Scala for Machine Learning [book review]
On Friday the Royal Statistical Society hosted a meeting on Statistical computing languages, organised by my colleague Colin Gillespie. Four languages were presented at the meeting: Python, Scala, Matlab and Julia. I presented the talk on Scala. The slides I presented are available, in addition to the code examples and instructions on how to run … Continue reading Statistical computing languages at the RSS
