This week’s Tech Talk was on the R Project for Statistical Computing within Ruby. The RinRuby project integrates the R interpreter in Ruby, exposing R’s statistical routines and graphics (charting, plotting) from within Ruby.

What would you do with R from within Ruby….

Brian Stanwyck showed off some sample uses using Linear Discriminant Analysis for attempting to “guess” whether or not you are male or female, just by asking your height and weight. It uses known “data” to learn and then extrapolates a guess based on the algorithm.

This comes in super handy for some of our big data projects. Doing a mean, standard deviation, or scatterplot is now a one-liner, and super fast.

Another neat tool for our tool belt!