Making the most of your investment in Big Data requires a good understanding of the new analytical tools and languages that are available. There’s been an explosion of these tools, built to assist analysts and developers with issues such as concurrency, functional programming, and domain-specific problems. The R Project is perhaps the best known and provides a wide variety of statistical, data mining and visualization capabilities. Among the reasons it is popular at this early stage in the evolution of Big Data, is because it can be adopted by analysts at various levels of technical expertise, including those with very little programming experience.

R is a cross-platform environment with comprehensive documentation. As such, it can be a little overwhelming on where and how to start using it. This talk will introduce you to the environment and help you along the path to solve Big Data analytical challenges. A light background in statistics would be advantageous for any attendees of this session, although rank novices will at least gain some insight into the issues, challenges and requirements for the analysis of Big Data.