Re:Try R — A new online course, for free
by frankc on Thursday December 06, 2012 @12:10PM
(#4882563)
Not doing it wrong, but only using a subset of R. For instance, R has powerful data manipulation ability that can get your data to use the subset of R that does what Excel does. R also has a huge library of packages that go way beyond what Excel can do, especially for statistics. Sure, you can do an ols regression in Excel, but you can you do a complicated machine learning model?
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Re:Try R — A new online course, for free
by taeric on Thursday December 06, 2012 @01:36PM
(#4883052)
I should have been clearer. I've never been "good" at using Excel. So far, I've really only done things that I would think you could do in Excel. Might be a touch overkill, but I'm not sure. I am curious which data manipulation items you are referring to. Any good pointers?
I am going through the Machine Learning for Hackers book, though. So far it has been interesting. I guess I never realized that machine learning is essentially statistics. (Or am I looking at that incorrectly, too?)