LeBow Professor Writes Book About Programming Language

Drexel LeBow College of Business Assistant Professor Elea McDonnell Feit and Google researcher Chris Chapman recently published the book R for Marketing Research and Analytics. The two wrote the book in order to teach marketers the free open-source statistical programming language, R. Professor Feit spoke with LeBow about what the R language is and why it is important for business leaders to learn.

“R is a programming language that is designed specifically to work with data and statistics. When you are dealing with ever larger sets of data from increasingly diverse data sources, you really want to use a programming language to process and analyze the data. While it can be a bit more difficult to learn, switching to R will make analysts much more efficient in the long run and the analyses they produce will be much more reliable. R has become the most popular data analysis tool and is used in finance, statistics, economics and lots of other data-focused disciplines,” she said.

Professor Feit explains how her book takes the reader from the fist step of typing a command into R to completing sophisticated analysis to segment their customers asked on their behavior, analyze which products are frequently purchased together and what features of a product will drive consumers to buy. Feit says that the program, which used to be only available to be purchased from specialized software vendors or high end consultants, is now freely available to anyone who wants to learn.

“That is an important point about R,” she said. “Like many of the modern tools of data science such as Hadoop and Python, R is open-source. Hundreds of expert statisticians and programmers have donated their time to develop R and anyone can review the existing code and build on it.”

regions: Philadelphia

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