Building a statistical significance testing web service powered by R

http://garysieling.com/blog/building-a-statistical-significance-testing-web-service-powered-by-r

by garysieling • 14 years ago

20 10 14 years ago

taf2• 14 years ago

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?

garysieling2• 14 years ago

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/

tocomment• 14 years ago

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?

k3n• 14 years ago

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.

pav3l• 14 years ago

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

hessenwolf• 14 years ago

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.

garysieling2• 14 years ago

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.

tangue• 14 years ago

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

larrydag• 14 years ago

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

tnai• 14 years ago

There's also an R buildpack for Heroku. There's a sample app written using Sinatra (Ruby) included.

https://github.com/virtualstaticvoid/heroku-buildpack-r

Building a statistical significance testing web service powered by R

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