Posit vs. TensorFlow

In my humble opinion, if you are working on something related to Statistics, RStudio is your go-to tool. But if you are looking for something in Machine Learning, look out for Python. The beauty is that there are packages now by which you can write Python/SQL in R. Cross-platform functionality like such makes RStudio way ahead of its competition. A couple of chinks in RStudio armor are very small and can be considered as nagging just for the sake of argument. Other than completely based on programming language, I couldn't find significant drawbacks to using RStudio. It is one of the best free software available in the market at present.

Incentivized

1. Whenever the problem has the demand for a neural networks based solution, Tensorflow (TF) is a great fit.
2. The tf.dataset API makes it really simple to create complex data pipelines in a few lines of code.
3. tf.estimators API abstracts all the complex computation graph creation logic making it very simple to get started.
4. Eager execution makes it simple to develop a TF graph as debugging the code would be like any other imperative Python program.
5. TF abstracts all the complexities of scaling it to multiple machines. It has various code and data distribution algorithms ready to use.
6. Projects like TensorBoard make monitoring the training process really easy. It also gives the ability to view embeddings without any extra code. Their What-If is extremely useful for poking and understanding a black box model. It also has tools to visualize data to quickly check for anomalies.
7. TF Autograph aims to covert any normal Python code into a distributed program which is quite handy to scale an existing code base.

Incentivized

• RStudio does an excellent job providing a clean user interface for R or Shiny applications
• RStudio integrates natively with version control software
• Users can program with either R or Python
• RStudio has a command line built in, eliminating the need for a separate program for a REPL

Incentivized

• Data pipeline implementation is quite good, loading large amounts of data and pre-process it in an efficient way is no more issue for us
• It supports all major DL algorithms and network layouts such as ConvNets, RNN, LSTMs, Word2Vec, and even the latest transformer architecture
• The abstraction for the device is perfectly done and its support seamlessly for multiple GPU and even TPU will bring a lot of performance gain for enterprise scoped solution while still keep the flexibility
• The TensorBoard is amazing. I haven't seen a similar thing in other frameworks on the market. It allows us to quickly understand and debug the model with the info visualization which makes understanding much better
• A very supportive community, which is the key for sharing the ideas and find the quick and best solutions

Incentivized

• Ability to scale across the company is limited based on the users license, cannot share a dashboard to the general view of the company.
• Ability to retain session - not simple method to customize view per user (e.g., once session is ended, the users will return next time to the baseline view).
• Ability to enable communication between multiple users - leave notes, tag other users, or share specific view.

Incentivized

• It would be much better if they could provide good documentation and easy ways to understand concepts.
• It is difficult to understand the concept behind for example, Tensor Graph, which takes a lot of time.
• As you have to write everything, it is time consuming to write the implementation of whole neural network. It would be better if they can provide some wrapper library to make things easier.

Incentivized

There is no other platform that meets our needs. Even if it was terrible we would still use it but fortunately for us it is a very solid project with a great support team. I hope in the future to expand our use and get more licences as well as upgrade to RStudio workbench but for now we are very happy.

Incentivized

For someone who learns how to use the software and picks up on the "language" of R, it's very easy to use. For beginners, it can be hard and might require a course, as well as the appropriate statistical training to understand what packages to use and when

Incentivized

Support of multiple components and ease of development.

Incentivized

RStudio is very available and cheap to use. It needs to be updated every once in a while, but the updates tend to be quick and they do not hinder my ability to make progress. I have not experienced any RStudio outages, and I have used the application quite a bit for a variety of statistical analyses

Incentivized

Since R is trendy among statisticians, you can find lots of help from the data science/ stats communities. If you need help with anything related to RStudio or R, google it or search on StackOverflow, you might easily find the solution that you are looking for.

Incentivized

Community support for TensorFlow is great. There's a huge community that truly loves the platform and there are many examples of development in TensorFlow. Often, when a new good technique is published, there will be a TensorFlow implementation not long after. This makes it quick to ally the latest techniques from academia straight to production-grade systems. Tooling around TensorFlow is also good. TensorBoard has been such a useful tool, I can't imagine how hard it would be to debug a deep neural network gone wrong without TensorBoard.

Incentivized

We did it at the individual level: anyone willing to code in R can use it. No real deployment involved.

Use of cloud for better execution power is recommended.

Incentivized

RStudio was provided as the most customizable. It was also strictly the most feature-rich as far as enabling our organization to script, run, and make use of R open-source packages in our data analysis workstreams. It also provided some support for python, which was useful when we had R heavy code with some python threaded in. Overall we picked Rstudio for the features it provided for our data analysis needs and the ability to interface with our existing resources.

Incentivized

Can't seem to choose any deep learning platform in the above, so I'll list it here: 1. Apache MXNet: this has been used for one of our main algorithms for search as an end-to-end pipeline. We chose this because of the Scala bindings, which makes it easier to integrate with out JVM backend. MXNet seems comparable to TensorFlow, although community support is not as good as TensorFlow, and there are issues with memory leaks that are being worked on. TensorFlow in general is easier to use, but MXNet isn't too far behind. 2. Keras: still a favorite. Often I use this when paired with TensorFlow. TensorFlow 2.0 will make it even easier. 3. PyTorch: only used it a little, so it's hard to provide a good opinion. 4. DL4J: used it initially in an early days project because it has good JVM support. Harder to used not because of poor API design, but because community support is lacking and features don't come out as fast as TensorFlow.

Incentivized

I think that RStudio scales pretty well based on the size of the datasets I'm using. It has multithreading capabilities unlike some other statistical analysis programs which is very useful in cutting down on time. The format of RStudio's syntax also makes it very easy to replicate regardless off the scale of the analysis and data set

Incentivized

• Using it for data science in a very big and old company, the most positive impact, from my point of view, has been the ability of spreading data culture across the group. Shortening the path from data to value.
• Still it's hard to quantify economic benefits, we are struggling and it's a great point of attention, since splitting out the contribution of the single aspects of a project (and getting the RStudio pie) is complicated.
• What is sure is that, in the long run, RStudio is boosting productivity and making the process in which is embedded more efficient (cost reduction).

Incentivized

• Positive Impact- As I mentioned before its open source. Very easy to learn for average programmer/ developer. We were able to design a POC model for understanding the patient appointment cancellation snd reasons behind it in 3 week time frame.
• Negative Impact- If you are using tensor flow for small project it works fine. If you are trying to build a model for face recognition it will be hard to program and train the system. It needs data to be processed before hand cannot learn on the go.