Jaynal Abedin - Data Manipulation with R

Erik M. Rodrguez Pacheco works as a manager in the business intelligence unit at Banco Improsa in San Jos, Costa Rica. He has 11 years of experience in the finance industry. He is currently a professor of the Business Intelligence Specialization program at the Continuing Education Programs of Instituto Tecnolgico de Costa Rica. Erik is an enthusiast of new technologies, particularly those related to business intelligence, data mining, and data science. He holds a bachelor's degree in business administration from Universidad de Costa Rica, a specialization in business intelligence from Instituto Tecnolgico de Costa Rica, a specialization in data mining from Promidat (Programa Iberoamericano de Formacin en Minera de Datos), and a specialization in business intelligence and data mining from Universidad del Bosque, Colombia. He is currently enrolled in a specialization program in data science from Johns Hopkins University. He can be reached at http://cr.linkedin.com/in/erikrodriguezp.

Dr. Abbass Ismail Sharif is an assistant professor of clinical data sciences and operations at the University of Southern California. He holds a PhD in statistics, an MS in computer science, and an MS in instructional technology and learning sciences. Abbass does research in the field of statistical computing and data visualization. For this purpose, he extensively uses the R statistical environment. He has developed new multivariate visualization techniques for functional data, and is currently developing visualization techniques to study brain activity data collected using Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) technology.

Abbass has won a prestigious research award from the American Statistical Society for his doctoral work. He teaches both graduate and undergraduate statistics courses that range from introductory statistics and data analysis for decision-making to advanced modern statistical learning techniques, statistical computing, and data visualization.

Dr. Brian J. Spiering started coding in his elementary school's computer laboratory, hacking BASIC to make programs that entertained his peers and annoyed the school authorities. Much later, he earned a PhD in psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, with emphasis on cognition, perception, and cognitive neuroscience. His research is focused on building mathematical and computer models of the human brain and behavior. He has taught biological psychology, data analysis, and statistics. Brian currently works as a data scientist and resides in San Francisco, California, USA.

Jitendra Kumar Yadav is a senior development architect working in research and development for product development and innovation. He is an expert in cloud and big data product development. He has contributed to the open source community in the form of code development and support for a variety of platforms based on big data, cloud technologies, virtualization, storage, networking, and cloud security. For this, he has used programming languages such as C++, Python, R, Java, Go, and Perl.

Jitendra loves to share his knowledge with fellow techies and others. He does so by publishing papers and books and attending corporate tech events. He has won several awards for his excellent contributions to product development in the fields of cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence, and virtualization. He has over 12 years of professional experience, and has spent most of his time in research and development.

Occasionally, when Jitendra needs to take a break, he spends his time traveling.

I'd like to thank those who nurtured me, my mom and dad, for all the hope, faith, love, and wise counseling. I would also like to thank those from the Packt Publishing team who made this book happen, especially Leena and Sarah, the reviewers, and the MODX community for an awesome open source development platform.