Building a statistical significance testing web service powered by R

#1

Post by garysieling » Thu, Oct 18, 2012, 1:41 PM UTC

Building a statistical significance testing web service powered by R
garysieling.com

Re: Building a statistical significance testing web service powered by R

#2

Post by taf2 » Thu, Oct 18, 2012, 1:50 PM UTC

This is really neat! You should post more examples, like if I had a range of data points could I post that data set and have R output a best fit line?

Re: Building a statistical significance testing web service powered by R

#3

Post by tocomment » Thu, Oct 18, 2012, 2:10 PM UTC

Would it be possible to code everything in something like Django to handle the HTTP, view parts, and farm out the calculations to R?

How would you design that?

Re: Building a statistical significance testing web service powered by R

#4

Post by k3n » Thu, Oct 18, 2012, 2:23 PM UTC

tocomment wrote: post #3

Would it be possible to code everything in something like Django to handle the HTTP, view parts, and farm out the calculations to R? How would you design that?

Of course, but at that point you likely wouldn't be using any R-leaning webservers; rather, you'd start with any old web server, and then just make shell calls to R. Or, you _could_ do the "R as a service" type thing, and have your normal [Django] stack make a webservice call to the R-webservice.

Re: Building a statistical significance testing web service powered by R

#5

Post by pav3l » Thu, Oct 18, 2012, 3:09 PM UTC

tocomment wrote: post #3

Would it be possible to code everything in something like Django to handle the HTTP, view parts, and farm out the calculations to R? How would you design that?

Yes, you can use rpy/rpy2 in your python code to delegate stats to R

Re: Building a statistical significance testing web service powered by R

#6

Post by hessenwolf » Thu, Oct 18, 2012, 3:12 PM UTC

tocomment wrote: post #3

Would it be possible to code everything in something like Django to handle the HTTP, view parts, and farm out the calculations to R? How would you design that?

I made one in pylons. It kept blowing up in the memory. It was a bitch to get up and running and then debug. And then, well, I wasn't sure what I couldn't do with highcharts and python libraries instead.

Re: Building a statistical significance testing web service powered by R

#7

Post by garysieling » Thu, Oct 18, 2012, 3:19 PM UTC

tocomment wrote: post #3

Would it be possible to code everything in something like Django to handle the HTTP, view parts, and farm out the calculations to R? How would you design that?

That's the general direction I am heading, although I haven't picked a front-end yet. I'm thinking of returning the more complex results as JSON, and using ExtJS for grids, charts, etc.

Re: Building a statistical significance testing web service powered by R

#8

Post by garysieling » Thu, Oct 18, 2012, 3:24 PM UTC

taf2 wrote: post #2

This is really neat! You should post more examples, like if I had a range of data points could I post that data set and have R output a best fit line?

Thanks, glad you liked it, I have more examples coming.

There is a library you can install that looks like a web-based charting frontend for R, although I have not had a chance to try it-

http://www.stat.ucla.edu/~jeroen/ggplot2/

Re: Building a statistical significance testing web service powered by R

#9

Post by tangue » Thu, Oct 18, 2012, 4:50 PM UTC

Keep in mind that R is an in-memory language and that each object you'll be creating will be stored in RAM. This could be tricky if you have huge datasets

Re: Building a statistical significance testing web service powered by R

#10

Post by larrydag » Thu, Oct 18, 2012, 4:55 PM UTC

I've heard good things about the package Rserve. It's a good way to combine a lot of server side R requests with your online app of choice. http://www.rforge.net/Rserve/doc.html