Why R is Bad for You

There was little or no conversation or questioning around cleansing, prep, transforms, feature engineering, feature selection, model selection, and absolutely none about about hyperparameter tuning. The key issue is that I can clean, prep, transform, engineer features, select features, and run 10 or more model types simultaneously in less than 60 minutes (sometimes a lot less) and get back a nice display of the most accurate and robust model along with exportable code in my selection of languages. Although SAS and SPSS provided very deep discounts to colleges and universities each instructor had to pay several thousand dollars for the teaching version and each student had to pay a few hundred dollars (eventually there were student web based versions that were free but the instructor still had to pay). About the author: Bill Vorhies is Editorial Director for Data Science Central and has practiced as a data scientist and commercial predictive modeler since 2001.