Editor’s Note: Why Did I Attend the RStudio Conf 2020? is a new Guest Post written by Bruce Hahn, SRA, MAI, CRE.  We’re excited to hear about his recent experience at the RStudio Conf 2020. He is exploring and expanding his skills using R and RStudio to create his appraisal reports. He created his website, BruceHahn.com entirely in the R programming language.

Bruce will be joining us with the Community of Asset Analysts in Oakland, CA, March 23 – 27, 2020 sharing his knowledge in our classes, assisting with teaching SGDS2. Bruce contributes to The Asset Analyst Report^© (TAAR).

Why attend the largest conference of R users in the world with over 2,000 attendees? Well anyone there will tell you that everyone goes for all the stickers! RStudio is the company that created the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) of the same name. In addition to the IDE, they also create and maintain many packages in R including the core Tidyverse packages. RStudio promotes learning R/data science and this conference is dedicated to that learning as well as networking with other data scientists.

This is the fifth year that RStudio Conf has been held. I also attended the event in 2018 when it was in San Diego. It is a four-day event, with the first two days consisting of 16 specialized training sessions. This training is not inexpensive; however, it is very comprehensive, and you will leave with knowledge and tools that you can put to work right away. The last two days are a series of four different seminar tracks. You can pick and choose among different subject matters ranging from machine learning, to communicating your results with R Markdown, or Shiny, and even specialized topics focused on a particular business segment. I attended many events for the finance sector and had the chance to meet and talk with many quantitative analysts in attendance at these sessions. The chance to talk with them, understand what they do with R, and how they use it in their businesses was good learning for me!

The conference is growing rapidly. There were about 1,100 in San Diego in 2018 and nearly 2,250 this year in San Francisco. Next January it will be held in Orlando, Florida and I am sure it will see even larger attendance. This highlights the continued rapid growth of R in all business segments. I was aware that many other business segments are far ahead of Real Estate with the use of data science and R. I was not aware that many of these business segments are still struggling to get more practitioners to make the jump from Excel to R. But it is happening!

One of the other takeaways from RStudio Conf 2020 was that the growth of data will continue at an exponential rate. I heard the estimate that 90% of all data in the world is new in the last two years. At this growth rate there will be roughly 100 times more data in a decade than there is now. The only way to analyze this mountain of information in a meaningful way will be with proper statistical methods and data science. Data visualization is a very important part of this and if you have not seen the powerful visualizations possible from the ggplot2 package in R you need to investigate to understand!

We are well aware this kind of data growth is happening with real estate. I sat at many of these sessions and wondered to myself why do appraisers still cherry pick just a handful of comparable data points and make relatively random adjustments to them? The data science framework provides so many better tools to create a reliable and far more meaningful analysis and results! It saddened me that I was the only real estate valuation analyst in attendance at RStudio Conf 2020. And yes, I will attend another future RStudio Conf. I have to thank my friend George Dell, SRA, MAI, ASA, CRE, for enlightening me about data science, R, and its usefulness in real estate valuation. I have learned much, but I have so much more to learn! The learning is good and makes the job fun and easier to do! All of the RStudio Conf 2020 sessions were recorded and are posted to RStudio’s Conf 2020 webpage. Previous conference sessions are available on RStudio’s YouTube channel – I’d encourage you to check some of them out! And after that put your knowledge to work and get your hands dirty by using Evidence Based Valuation with R and RStudio!