TokyoR #37 29 March 2014

On 29 March 2014, I attended the 37th Tokyo R user group meeting (TokyoR). It was a very good turn out with about 50 participants at the NIFTY Corporation's office in Shinjuku Tokyo.
The session started at 14:30 with five presentations and seven lightning talks, followed by drinks.

Presentations
This meeting was presented in Japanese. So, I named English titles for them.

1. Learn R in 10 minutes
2. Introduction to data mining with R
The first presentation was given by Nobuaki Ooshiro from Yahoo Japan. Second @Prunus1350, who presides the meetup "Pattern recognition for beginners", introduced the textbook for R, "Learning data mining with R". These first two presentations are very useful introductions to R.

3. Feature selection with R packages
@srctaha talked about feature selection, which is selecting subsets
of variables that together have good predictive power. First, He introduced the methods of feature selection, for example, Wrappers, Filters and Embeded. Second, he presented the useful R packages for feature selection (seven packages!). Because his explanation were full of both theories and simulations, I could smoothly comprehend the elements of feature selection.

４. Discrete choice models with R
Hiroki Sano (@sanoche16), who works as a data scientist in a consulting firm, gave a talk about discrete choice models. When you works in marketing research, you can not avoid discrete choice models. He taught the mechanism of discrete choice models and how to apply it with mlogit package.

5. House hunting with R
Shota Yasui (@housecat442) showed the example of decision making analysis. He took  home hunting as the example. He used XML package for acquiring house rent data and estimated the value of house with regression model, then compared it for real data. His strategy was simple but powerful. Like him, I hope that much more people make use of various data for their own decision making.

Lighting talks
After five presentations, seven lightning talks were given. In only 5 minutes, all presenters talked about impressive contents.
I just list titles below. For more details, please check out slides.

• Quantile regression with R @aich8 
• Introduction to private decision analysis -> me
• A little thought of Kernel and SVM @tetsuroito
• How to handle missing data @Hiro_macchan
• R coding standard @soultoru
• Introduction to SIR model @yoshi_fit
• Interactive visualization with rCharts

Next Tokyo R
Next meeting is scheduled for 19 April.
Thanks to NIFTY Corporation for hosting the event.