R High Performance Programming

by Aloysius Lim, William Tjhi

Overview

With the increasing use of information in all areas of business and science, R provides an easy and powerful way to analyze and process the vast amounts of data involved. It is one of the most popular tools today for faster data exploration, statistical analysis, and statistical modeling and can generate useful insights and discoveries from large amounts of data.

Through this practical and varied guide, you will become equipped to solve a range of performance problems in R programming. You will learn how to profile and benchmark R programs, identify bottlenecks, assess and identify performance limitations from the CPU, identify memory or disk input/output constraints, and optimize the computational speed of your R programs using great tricks, such as vectorizing computations. You will then move on to more advanced techniques, such as compiling code and tapping into the computing power of GPUs, optimizing memory consumption, and handling larger-than-memory data sets using disk-based memory and chunking.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781783989270
Publisher:	Packt Publishing
Publication date:	01/29/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Aloysius Lim has a knack for translating complex data and models into easy-to-understand insights. As cofounder of About People, a data science and design consultancy, he loves solving problems and helping others to find practical solutions to business challenges using data. His breadth of experience—7 years in the government, education, and retail industries—equips him with unique perspectives to find creative solutions.

William Tjhi is a data scientist with years of experience working in academia, government, and industry. He began his data science journey as a PhD candidate researching new algorithms to improve the robustness of high-dimensional data clustering. Upon receiving his doctorate, he moved from basic to applied research, solving problems among others in molecular biology and epidemiology using machine learning. He published some of his research in peer-reviewed journals and conferences. With the rise of Big Data, William left academia for industry, where he started practicing data science in both business and public sector settings. William is passionate about R and has been using it as his primary analysis tool since his research days. He was once part of Revolution Analytics, and there he contributed to make R more suitable for Big Data.