Easy and fast analysis of data is an uphill task for any Rubyist today. Ruby has been mostly restricted to web development and scripting, until now. In this talk we will have a look at daru, a gem from the Ruby Science Foundation specifically developed for simplifying data analysis tasks for Rubyists.
You will learn how you can use daru for analyzing large data sets and get a tour of daru being coupled with other Ruby tools like pry, iruby and nyaplot for interactive and standalone data analysis and plotting for gaining quick insights into your data — all with a few lines of Ruby code.
This will be an example-driven talk on performing advanced yet simple to understand data analysis tasks in Ruby using daru and other allied scientific gems like iruby, nyaplot, gnuplotrb and nmatrix. Since Ruby is most frequently used for web programming, I will talk with a focus on analysis and visualization of data that web services are likely to generate.
Attendees will also be introduced to crunching and cleaning data read from a variety of sources and generating beautiful plots of that data with just a few lines of Ruby code. Prior experience with data analysis is not a necessity but having some exposure to basic data analysis is recommended. This is an entry/intermediate level talk that will focus more on introducing listeners to the new world of data analysis in Ruby than elaborating on various methodologies that are used for data analysis.
I would also like use this platform to convey to the well-informed audience present at Ruby Kaigi about the work that the Ruby Science Foundation is doing to make Ruby a viable alternative in a field which was previously thought of as the domain of languages like Python and R. Talking about our work at SciRuby in front of the very people that have made the Ruby language what it is now will prove very valuable for developers wanting such a tool in Ruby and for us as an organization for getting more contributors and users onboard.
Data has deeply penetrated almost every type of industry today. May it be generating basic charts or visualizing a user's monthly spending or predicting stock markets, data is everywhere, and it is very important for any language to have a tool set for making sense of this data. Rubyists, when faced with data challenges, would mostly revert to other languages like Python and R for their data tasks or rely on third party software like Google Charts for visualization.
Through this talk I aim to introduce Rubyists to tools that make simple and advanced data analysis and visualization tasks possible in Ruby.
I am daru's author and have been developing it for the past year in co-ordination with members of the Ruby Science Foundation. In May 2015 I was selected for Google Summer of Code for further developing daru with SciRuby as the mentoring organization. I also received the Ruby Association Grant 2015 for further development of the Ruby scientific stack, particularly improving nmatrix to support more high speed C libraries like FFTW and GSL. I am now the admin for SciRuby for GSOC 2016, and will also be mentoring a student this summer for further development of daru. We hope to make daru much faster and better equipped for real world data after the GSOC project has been completed successfully.
My GSOC project involved integrating daru with other ruby scientific gems and in the process greatly enhancing daru's capabilities, thus making it a popular choice among data analysis tools in Ruby.
Over the past few months daru has seen over 19,000 downloads and code contributions from numerous people. I was also invited to speak about daru at DeccanRubyConf 2015, Pune, India and am scheduled to talk at Red Dot Ruby Conf 2016, Singapore. You can see my talk at Deccan Ruby Conf here. I am an active contributor and reveiwer on many SciRuby projects and am passionate about seeing the project take off successfully.