Conference Review: The 2nd Chinese R Conference

The ‘Conference Review: The 2nd Chinese R Conference’ article from the 2010-1 issue.

The 2nd Chinese R Conference was successfully held in December 2009 in Beijing and Shanghai. This conference was organized in two cities so that more people would be able to enjoy similar talks without additional traveling cost. The Beijing session, held in the Renmin University of China (RUC) on December 5–6, 2009, was sponsored and organized by the Center for Applied Statistics and the School of Statistics, RUC. Yanping Chen served as the chair of the conference while Janning Fan was the secretary. Yixuan Qiu and Jingjing Guan were in charge of local arrangements. The Shanghai session took place in the East China Normal University (ECNU) on December 12–13, 2009; it was organized by the School of Resources and Environment Science (SRES) and the School of Finance and Statistics, ECNU, and sponsored by Mango Solutions. Jing Jiao and Xiang Zhang served as the chairs of the conference; the Molecular Ecology Group in SRES was in charge of local arrangements. Both sessions were co-organized by the web community “Capital of Statistics” (http://cos.name).

Beside promoting the communication among Chinese R users as the 1st Chinese R Conference did, the 2nd Chinese R Conference concentrated on the applications of R in statistical computing and graphics in various disciplines. The slogan of this conference was “useR eveRywheRe”, indicating R is wide-spread in a variety of fields as well as there are a large amount of useRs in China now.

In total, more than 300 participants from over 90 institutions took part in this conference. There were 19 talks in the Beijing session:

Opening

A review on the history of the Chinese R Conference and a brief introduction to R by Yanping Chen;

Statistical Graphics

Introduction to R base graphics by Tao Gao and Cheng Li; Matrix visualization using the package corrplot by Taiyun Wei;

Statistical Models

Nonparametric methods and robust estimation of quantile regression by Chen Zuo; R and WinBUGS by Peng Ding; Grey System Theory in R by Tan Xi;

Software Development

Integrating R into C/C++ applications using Visual C++ by Yu Gong; Using R in online data analysis by Zhiyi Huang;

Industrial Applications

R in establishing standards for the food industry by Qiding Zhong; Investigation and monitoring on geological environment with R by Yongsheng Liu; R in marketing research by Yingchun Zhu; Zhiyi Huang also gave an example on handling atmosphere data with R; R in near-infrared spectrum analysis by Die Sun;

Data Mining

Jingjing Guan introduced RExcel with applications in data mining and the trend of data mining focused on ensemble learning; Dealing with large data and reporting automation by Sizhe Liu;

Kaleidoscope

Discussing security issues of R by Nan Xiao; Using R in economics and econometrics by Liyun Chen; R in psychology by Xiaoyan Sun and Ting Wang; R in spatial analysis by Huaru Wang; Optimization of molecular structure parameter matrix in QSAR with the package omd by Bin Ma;

More than 150 people from nearly 75 institutions all over China participated in the Shanghai session. Among these participants, we were honored to meet some pioneer Chinese useRs such as Prof Yincai Tang, the first teacher introducing R in the School of Finance and Statistics of ECNU. There were 13 talks given in the Shanghai session which partially overlapped with the Beijing session:

Opening

Introduction of the 2nd Chinese R conference (Shanghai session) by Jing Jiao, and opening address by Prof Yincai Tang and Prof Xiaoyong Chen (Vice President of SRES);

Theories

Bayesian Statistics with R and WinBUGS by Prof Yincai Tang; Grey System Theory in R by Tan Xi;

Graphics

Introduction to R base graphics by Tao Gao and Cheng Li; Matrix visualization using the package corrplot by Taiyun Wei;

Applications

Using R in economics and econometrics by Liyun Chen; Marketing analytical framework by Zhenshun Lin; Decision tree with the rpart package by Weijie Wang; Optimization of molecular structure parameter matrix in QSAR with the package omd by Bin Ma; Survival analysis in R by Yi Yu; The application of R and statistics in the semiconductor industry by Guangqi Lin;

Software Development

Dealing with large data and reporting automation by Sizhe Liu; JAVA development and optimization in R by Jian Li; Discussing security issues of R by Nan Xiao;

On the second day there was a training session for R basics (Learning R in 153 minutes by Sizhe Liu) and extensions (Writing R packages by Sizhe Liu and Yihui Xie; Extending R by Jian Li); a discussion session was arranged after the training. The conference was closed with a speech by Xiang Zhang.

Overall, participants were very interested in the topics contributed on the conference and the discussion session has reflected there was the strong need of learning and using R in China. After this conference, we have also decided to make future efforts on:

• Increasing the number of sessions of this conference to meet the demand of useRs in other areas;

• Promoting the communication between statistics and other disciplines via using R;

• Interacting with different industries through successful applications of R;

All slides are available online at http://cos.name/2009/12/2nd-chinese-r-conference-summary/. We thank Prof Xizhi Wu for his consistent encouragement on this conference, and we are especially grateful to Prof Yanyun Zhao, Dean of the School of Statistics of RUC, for his great support on the Beijing session. We look forward to the next R conference in China and warmly welcome more people to attend it. The main session is tentatively arranged in the Summer of 2010. Inquiries and suggestions can be sent to or http://cos.name/ChinaR/ChinaR-2010.

Note

This article is converted from a Legacy LaTeX article using the texor package. The pdf version is the official version. To report a problem with the html, refer to CONTRIBUTE on the R Journal homepage.