Rexer Analytics has been conducting regular polls of data miners and analytics professionals on their software choices since 2007, and the results of the 2013 Rexer Analytics Data Miner Survey were presented at last month’s Predictive Analytics World conference in Boston. Here are some highlights of the responses from the 1,039 non-vendor participants. (You can request a free copy of the full survey results from Rexer Analytics.)
R is the most popular data mining tool, used at least occasionally by 70% of those polled. This popularity holds amongst all of the subgroups in the survey as well: R remains the most-used tool amongst corporate data miners (70%), consulting data miners (73%), academic data miners (75%) and nonprofit/NGO/government data miners (67%). And while the average data miner reports using five software tools, R is also the most popular primary tool in the survey, at 24% overall.
The popularity of R is skyrocketing, and its prevalence has increased in every single Rexer poll conducted since 2007, both in overall use and as the primary tool.
Most users are satisfied with R, with more than 85% of users self-identifying as “satisfied” or “extremely satisfied”. The software platforms with the most dissatisfied users are SAS and SAS Enterprise Miner.
These results are in line with other recent polls about R usage. The annual KDDNuggets poll of top languages for analytics, data mining and data science, released in September, named R as the most popular software for the third year running.
By: David Smith, revolutionanalytics
Originally published at revolutionanalytics
The 2013 survey results show that about 70% of experts use R, more than 85% are very satisfied, proving that slice master is not only popular but also of high quality, far surpassing traditional tools such as SAS.