[socal-piggies] Join meeting with R/data analysis user group @ UCLA in November?

[Grig Gheorghiu]

I forwarded a message from Szilard Pafka last week about their R/data
analysis user group meetings. The next one, on November 17th, is about
"Software tools for data analysis; The future of R".

http://www.meetup.com/LAarea-R-usergroup/calendar/15077745/?from=list&offset=0

Szilard sent me an email saying:

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We have them [the meetings] at UCLA as my fellow co-organizer is head
of Stats Dept. He's a great guy with a very strong computational view
of statistics/data analysis. We could do the joint meeting there.
Would that work for you guys?

I think we have quite a few Python users in our group, I'll ask next
time and/or in a survey question (I'll also recommend your group). Our
next meeting (October) we'll have a short talk on RPy2 the Python
interface for making calls to R and also on text processing/mining.
Also our November meeting (which I just posted this morning) might be
of some interest to you guys. We'll discuss tools for data analysis,
but more importantly we'll decide what tools we'd like to hear about
in subsequent talks. I think Python, Numpy/Scipy are all excellent
candidates :) So maybe this is how we can have the joint meeting ;)

As for myself, I've been looking at Python very recently as I have
some text processing problem R is not the best for. Also, I started
rewriting some of my "glue" (or cron) shell scripts in Python, feels
much better ;) R is great for data analysis mainly because of the
2000+ statistics libraries which allows to explore/visualize data, fit
models etc. in 2-3 lines a code. The R language itself is not the
brightest and looking at Python helps me better see the problems.

How about you guys? Many interested in data analysis in your group?
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So....would you guys be interested in a joint meeting at UCLA in November?

Grig