I believe that in the next 5 years, R will prove to be a break through technology for corporate finance.
R is an open source software environment widely used by statisticians, data miners, market makers, and academics. The corporate finance world is lagging behind these groups in adopting R for analysis and reporting.
R Wikipedia
What is special about R? R is
1. Open source
The only implementation cost is training. There is a large community of smart people making useful packages available to the public for free and easy download. These network effects will continue to quickly increase the utility of R.
2. Well designed
R uses a high level programming language (S) that makes the retrieval, analysis, and visualization of data extremely efficient. This empowers users to develop programs to perform complex reports faster than with any other software environment.
In the coming posts, I will go into greater detail on how to implement R, and the implications of the software for the profession.
I'm curious - this is the first I've heard of R. I wonder how best to convince our fellow green-eyeshaders that they need a statistical modeling package? The actuaries I used to know are using something along those lines for predicting catastrophic events. But for the smaller business - I think we're going to need an 'app.'
ReplyDeleteThanks Michi for the comment. R is great for stats, and it is also great for things that accountants and finance people do most of the time- like pulling data and performing calculations/ transformations on data sets. For example, accountants can use R in place of excel files that have multiple tabs, and which have many pivot table or vlookup intermediate steps. Next week I will post on how to install, and provide an example to help demonstrate.
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