Assignment 1

How R as a data analytics tool can be used in IE?

Submitted by:
Anushka Khandelwal
Simran Arora
Basil Basheer
Rahul Roy

What is R?
R is a Language to carry out programming and you can run the software for any
purpose like to study, change, and distribute it in any adapted versions, i.e. it is free
software. It is a widely used powerful programming language- employed for statistical
modeling, computing, Machine Learning algorithm, and data visualization. It also
includes an extensive catalog of graphical representation methods and reporting.R
Programming has become famous amongst programmers, statisticians, knowledge
analysts, researchers and marketers to retrieve, clean, analyze, compile and present
data.

Why analyze data using R?

● Straightforward handling of analyses using simple calculations
● Easy to learn for beginners
● Simple and advanced options of analysis available
● Flexible
● Provides both application area and statistical area specialties
● Ability to easily fix mistakes

Data analysis using R is increasing the efficiency in data analysis, because data
analytics using R, enables analysts to process data sets that are traditionally considered
large data-sets, e.g. previously it was not possible to process data sets of 500,000
cases together, but with R, on a machine with at least 2GB of memory, data sets off
500,000 cases and around 100 variables can be processed.

How R as a data analytics tool can be used in IE?

Manufacturing
Manufacturing companies like Ford, Modelez, and John Deere use R to analyze
customer sentiment. This helps them optimize their product according to trending
consumer interests and also to match their production volume to varying market
demand. They also use R to minimize their production costs and maximize profits.

R Use Cases in Manufacturing

● Ford Motor Company: Ford uses R for statistical analyses to support its
business strategy and to analyze customer sentiment about its product which
helps them in improving their future designs.
● John Deere: John Deere uses R to forecast demand for their products and
spare parts. They also use it to forecast crop yield and use that data for their
business strategy and to meet market demand and downturns.

R allows data scientists to effectively analyse large amounts of real-time data but Shiny
visualises that data effectively and easily to present outputs for non-analysts, allowing
non-technical stakeholders to easily review and filter the data. Outputs can then be
hosted on a client’s own servers or via RStudio’s hosting service.

Example: Mango delivered a large SAS to R migration project with a global

semiconductor manufacturer. A complex Shiny application was created to replace the
expensive SAS application software already in use. This made it possible to exit an
expensive SAS license and adopt modern analytic techniques. This has resulted in
improved production yields, reduced costs and enthused production teams with a
modern production infrastructure.

Mondelēz were using a SAS Roast Coffee Blend Generator. Mango used advanced
prescriptive analytics to migrate the client to R, resulting in optimization of their coffee
recipe, improved yield qualities and reduced production costs

People have used R in the manufacturing field for predictive analytics for some time
now. Predictive analytics plays an important part to optimize operational efficiency and
to reduce risk in the manufacturing field. Usually in this field the data is of good quality
so there isn’t much need of data cleaning. The main challenge lies in the data
exploration and extracting the information from it. Here R is very useful due to number
of tools and packages for data exploration. For example ggplot2 package is used for
visual data exploration or one can use iplots package for interactive multivariate data
exploration
R in E-commerce:

The e-commerce industry is one of the most important sectors that utilize Data Science.
R is one of the standard tools that is being used in e-commerce.

Since these internet-based companies have to deal with various forms of data,
structured and unstructured, as well as from varying data sources like spreadsheets and
databases (SQL & NoSQL), R proves to be an effective choice for these industries.

E-commerce companies use R for analyzing cross-selling products to their customers.

In cross-selling, we suggest additional products to the customer, that complements their
original purchase. These types of suggestions and recommendations are best analyzed
with the help of R.

Various statistical procedures like linear modeling are necessary to analyze the
purchases made by the customers as well as in predicting product sales. Furthermore,
companies use R for carrying out A/B testing analysis across the pages of their
products.

R Use Cases in E-commerce

● Amazon: Amazon uses R and data analysis to improve their cross-product

suggestions.
● Flipkart: Flipkart uses R for predictive analysis which helps them with
targetted advertisements.

R in Machine Learning:

R was built by statisticians, for statisticians – and most developers can tell that by
looking at its particular syntax. Since the mathematical computations involved in
machine learning are derived from statistics, R comes in handy to those who want to
gain a better understanding of the underlying details and build something truly
innovative.For example, Caret gives a boost to R's machine learning capabilities with its
set of functions that make creating predictive models more efficient. R developers can
take advantage of advanced data analysis packages that cover the pre-modeling,
modeling, and post-modeling stages, and are directed at specific tasks such as model
validation or data visualisation. The ecosystem of statistical model packages for R is
more extensive than in Python.
Data analysis in Industrial Engineering:

Some of the important features of R for data analysis application are –

1. R provides various important packages for data wrangling like dplyr, purrr,
readxl, google sheets, datapasta, jsonlite, tidyquant, tidyr etc.
2. R provides extensive support for statistical modelling. Since Data Science is
statistics heavy, R is an ideal tool for implementing various statistical
operations on it.
3. R is an attractive tool for various data science applications because it
provides aesthetic visualization tools like ggplot2, scatterplot3D, lattice,
highcharter etc.
4. R is heavily used in data science applications for ETL (Extract, Transform,
Load). It provides an interface for many databases like SQL and even
spreadsheets.
5. Another important ability of R is to interface with NoSQL databases and
analyze unstructured data. This is very useful in Data Science applications
where a pool of data has to be analyzed.
6. With R, data scientists can apply machine learning algorithms to gain
insights about future events. There are various packages like rpart, CARET,
randomForest, and nnet.

Use Cases of R Language

● Ford Motor Company – Ford relies on Hadoop. It also relies on R for statistical
analysis as well as carrying out data-driven support for decision making.
● Google – Google uses R to calculate ROI on advertising campaigns and to
predict economic activity and also to improve the efficiency of online advertising.
● Foursquare – R is an important stack behind Foursquare’s famed
recommendation engine.
● John Deere – Statisticians at John Deere use R for time series modeling and
also geospatial analysis in a reliable and reproducible way. The results are then
integrated with Excel and SAP.
● Microsoft – Microsoft uses R for the Xbox matchmaking service and also as a
statistical engine within the Azure ML framework.