Revolution Analytics Fuels Data Science Competitions with Free Revolution R Statistics Software

Revolution Analytics, the leading commercial provider of R software, services and support, today announced free Revolution R Enterprise software for data scientists participating in Kaggle data science competitions sponsored by organizations such as Deloitte, NASA, Wikipedia and The Heritage Health Network. Kaggle, the leading platform provider for data modeling and prediction competition, reports that 50 percent of winners across all its competitions submit data models written in R – the world’s most powerful statistical language -- while almost one in three contestants cite R as their analysis tool of choice.

Revolution R Enterprise brings high performance, productivity and enterprise readiness to open source R. The product is optimized for the demands and requirements of production business environments, with advanced innovations around big data analysis, application integration and scalability. Through this free software offer, Revolution Analytics aims to bring the power of Revolution R to even more Kaggle contestants.

“Competitions Bring Out the Best in Data Analytics”

Jeff Erhardt, COO of Revolution Analytics, commented, “We’ve entered an era of information where data science can be applied to solve nearly any real world problem. Technological and scientific advances brought us the R language, and by innovating on top of R, Revolution Analytics is providing data scientists with an opportunity to access broader sets of data faster to tackle today’s toughest data problems. We’re pleased to work with Kaggle to offer Revolution R Enterprise to its ambitious participants.”

In the last 10 years, R has exploded in popularity and functionality and has emerged as the data scientists’ tool of choice. Today, R is used by over two million analysts worldwide in academia and at cutting-edge, analytics-driven companies such as Google, Facebook and Bank of America.

Through this partnership, Revolution Analytics and Kaggle are expanding data scientists’ R tool kit by offering Revolution R Enterprise, which builds on open source R with innovations in big data analysis, integration and user experience. Kaggle’s open and forthcoming competitions include:

Deloitte: A $10,000 data science competition to find an improved chess-rating algorithm with the World Chess Federation (closes May 4).

Heritage Health Network: This $3 million predictive modeling competition aims to help solve America’s healthcare crisis (closes April 2013).

NASA: Opening in May, NASA will launch a competition to develop algorithms that map dark matter in the universe.

Wikipedia: Wikipedia will launch a competition that focuses on rendering an algorithm for predicting website editor turnover and its contributing factors.

“Kaggle aims to give companies and researchers access to the world’s best data scientists, while giving the world’s best data scientists access to real-world data and problems,” said Anthony Goldbloom, founder of Kaggle. “By partnering with Revolution Analytics to offer Revolution R Enterprise, we’re giving each contestant access to very powerful predictive analysis software.”

Online Resources

• Revolution R Enterprise download for Kaggle competitors
• Article: “Competitions Bring Out the Best in Data Analytics”
• Download Revolution R Enterprise for commercial users
• Kaggle competitions
• Why R is Hot whitepaper
• Track the global use of R on the Revolutions blog