Conference Review: The 1st Chinese R Conference

The ‘Conference Review: The 1st Chinese R Conference’ article from the 2009-1 issue.

The first Chinese R conference took place at the Renmin University of China (RUC), Beijing, China, December 13 – 14, 2008. The conference was organized and sponsored by the Center for Applied Statistics, RUC, and co-organized by the School of Statistics, RUC. Yihui Xie served as the chair of the conference and program committee; Qingping Zhang and Haoyu Yu were in charge of local arrangements.

Due to the lack of communication among Chinese R users in the past as well as increasing need of using and learning R for users in China, this pioneer meeting mainly focused on

• introducing and popularizing R as a powerful tool for statistical computation and graphics;

• gathering Chinese R users and promoting communication between different disciplines and industries;

Nearly 150 participants from 70 institutions all over China met in Beijing and heard 25 talks in the two-day conference, among which we were honored to meet several Chinese pioneer useRs such as Prof Xizhi Wu (who was the first person introducig R in the School of Statistics, RUC more than 7 years ago) and Guohui Ding (who contributed a lot of work in translating R manuals). Besides, we have also gained various support from overseas leading R/S people such as Richard Becker, John Maindonald (who was invited and tried to give a remote talk at the conference via Skype!) and Kurt Hornik.

The conference program included 13 sessions on several topics:

Opening

introduction of the first R conference by Yihui Xie and opening address by Prof Xizhi Wu;

Introduction to R

history and development of R by Guohui Ding and Yihui Xie respectively, and R basics by Sizhe Liu;

Statistics Basics

survey data analysis by Peng Zhan and statistical simulation by Tan Xi;

Biostatistics

introduction to Bioconductor and its application in bioinformatics by Gang Chen, application of R in genetics by Liping Hou, and research on biological competition by Hong Yu;

Data Mining

data mining with R by John Maindonald and Yihui Xie, introduction to various data mining methods in R by Sizhe Liu, and R in business intelligence by Jian Li;

Statistical Models

quantile regression in R by Chen Zuo;

Bayesian Statistics

introduction to Bayesian statistics in R by Peng Ding;

Statistical Computation

optimization in R by Taiyun Wei, and simulation and inference of stochastic differential equations using R by Yanping Chen;

Software Development

R web applications by Chongliang Li, and integration of R with Microsoft Office via R (D)COM server by Jian Li;

R in Industries

visualization of complex system by Xiang Zhang, fitting and projections of mortality stochastic models based on R and Excel by Yunmei Weng, and statistics and R in semiconductor industry by Ming Liu;

Teaching

introduction to the R package animation by Yihui Xie;

Kaleidoscope

application of R on hydrological modeling by Huaru Wang, turning from SAS to R by Jian Wang, using R in Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship by Bin Ma, exploring irregular data with R by Yihui Xie;

Publication

discussion of publishing R-related materials in China by Xiaojie Han;

Participants were really amazed to see the wide applications of R and made warm discussions after each presentation; session chairs often tried hard to control the time for discussion. This has reflected the strong need of learning and using R for Chinese users.

In the end, we decided to make future efforts on

• filling the gaps between statistics and other disciplines with the help of R;

• localization of R, e.g. form a special group to translate more materials on R;

• publishing more Chinese books and papers on R so that users could get started more easily (after this conference, there will be proceedings for publication);

All slides and pictures can be found in this Chinese web page: http://cos.name/2008/12/1st-chinese-r-conference-summary/. This conference was partially supported by the website http://cos.name, which is one of the largest statistical websites and main places for R help in China (see the board “S-Plus & R” in the forum). We look forward to the next R conference in China and warmly welcome more people (including overseas friends) to attend it.

CRAN packages used

animation

CRAN Task Views implied by cited packages

ReproducibleResearch, TeachingStatistics

Note

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