For our next meetup we'll have some fun with Mike Driscoll (fellow Data and R Geek, organizer of the Bay Area R meetup group, CTO of <a href="http://www.metamarkets.com">MetaMarkets</a>, <a href="http://www.oreilly.com">O'Reilly</a> Strata/OSCON speaker, and author of the <a... [read more]

For our next meetup we'll have some fun with Mike Driscoll (fellow Data and R Geek, organizer of the Bay Area R meetup group, CTO of <a href="http://www.metamarkets.com">MetaMarkets</a>, <a href="http://www.oreilly.com">O'Reilly</a> Strata/OSCON speaker, and author of the <a href="http://www.dataspora.com/2009/05/sexy-data-geeks/">"The Three Sexy Skills of Data Geeks"</a> blog post) while he talks about the validation of Bill James&rsquo; <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabermetrics">sabermetrics</a> approach to batting performance using 30 years of Major League Baseball statistics, and a derived predictor for batters&rsquo; salaries using <a href="http://www.r-project.org/">R</a>.
He will highlight R&rsquo;s functional programming features, its compact syntax for statistical modeling, and its ease of connectivity with persistent data stores. This talk will emphasize techniques and approach over detail.