A suitable language to build a bot for a complete beginner?

LinusP
Posts: 1871
Joined: Mon Jul 02, 2012 10:45 pm

Euler wrote:
Mon Jun 17, 2019 10:08 am
I've been interested in learning R purely for data analysis. Though never having even looked at it, I'm not sure what advantages it would offer. I only have a sketchy appreciation of why people use it for number crunching.
I work with a few data scientists and many are porting over to python, its just more flexible and more open source libraries out there sklearn / pandas / tensorflow.
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Euler
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Location: Bet Angel HQ

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Xeres
Posts: 52
Joined: Mon Jun 03, 2019 2:56 pm

Euler wrote:
Mon Jun 17, 2019 10:08 am
I've been interested in learning R purely for data analysis. Though never having even looked at it, I'm not sure what advantages it would offer. I only have a sketchy appreciation of why people use it for number crunching.
I was a big Excel/VBA user having worked in Finance for years and I thought it was the perfect tool because you can do almost anything, just very slowly.

I would say it's the best tool for data analysis, literally anything you want to do can be done within a few lines of code because its all wrapped up in functions.

I've built my entire end to end process from scraping, Betfair API, train/test models to sending out info in emails, files or posting to DB all in R.

If you have a reasonably powerful machine with at least 16GB of RAM you can crunch millions of rows very quickly.


The best thing for me is if I want to try a new model, you can format the data, then put it through 4 or 5 different models with cross validation and easily compare the results, so if I have a new idea (which happens daily) I can test it out very quickly.
Xeres
Posts: 52
Joined: Mon Jun 03, 2019 2:56 pm

LinusP wrote:
Mon Jun 17, 2019 10:26 am
Euler wrote:
Mon Jun 17, 2019 10:08 am
I've been interested in learning R purely for data analysis. Though never having even looked at it, I'm not sure what advantages it would offer. I only have a sketchy appreciation of why people use it for number crunching.
I work with a few data scientists and many are porting over to python, its just more flexible and more open source libraries out there sklearn / pandas / tensorflow.
It depends on what you want to do, Python is more general purpose but if you want to to data analysis/statistical programming then R would be the tool of choice. There are thousands of open source libraries and I would say it has better support. We use both in the office but we find that for number crunching and model building/charting, R is easier to work with.
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