Category Archives: R

What $480M of Gross Revenue Looks Like to Groupon

Posted on February 28, 2011 by Paul Butler

On Saturday, the Wall St. Journal posted details of an internal Groupon memo that reported $760 million in revenue last year. The WSJ article came just as I was finishing up a visualization of some data I had collected on … Continue reading →

Posted in Data Mining, R, Statistics | 14 Comments

Visualizing Facebook Friends: Eye Candy in R

Posted on December 18, 2010 by Paul Butler

Earlier this week I published a data visualization on the Facebook Engineering blog which, to my surprise, has received a lot of media covereage. I’ve received a lot comments about the image, many asking for more details on how I … Continue reading →

Posted in Computer Science, Data Mining, Math, R | 44 Comments

An experiment in A/B Testing my Résumé

Posted on July 1, 2010 by Paul Butler

Objective I’ll admit it: my résumé doesn’t stand out. I’ve had some great internships, but also a tendency to work for companies that aren’t (yet!) household names. And though I’m doing fine academically, it’s not well enough to stand out … Continue reading →

Posted in Data Mining, Math, R, Statistics | 22 Comments

Why R doesn't suck

Posted on June 19, 2010 by Paul Butler

I first encountered the R programming language a few years ago when I needed to make some plots. Although I’ve used it occasionally since, I always considered it a sort of “Perl for statisticians” — a useful swiss-army knife with … Continue reading →

Posted in Data Mining, Haskell, Math, Programming, Python, R, Ruby | 4 Comments