Pro Bono: IEEE Chicago Section Statistician - Part 1
Over three years have past since my last post here on my pro bono efforts outside of the workplace. My latest pro bono contributions over the last few months have been working as Statistician for the IEEE Chicago section. The Statistician role is new for the section, and works within the Membership Development team.
Much of my time to date has been spent working to get familiar with the data that is currently available on our membership. The SAMIEEE database uses Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) 11g. Unfortunately, my early efforts to obtain programmatic access to the database via IP address and port was not successful, so I create rough data sets via the web front end that OBIEE provides and then export for analyses.
At a high level, my CSV exports from OBIEE are imported to PostgreSQL, and then I use the R language with a package called sqldf to perform analyses. Traditional SQL statements can be run against database tables in this manner as though they were R language data frames, making it much easier to work with data for someone such as myself who is adept at SQL as a technical architect.
My plan is to get into more detail regarding the specifics of my setup in later posts. As part of this first post, I want to share the first visualization I created for the IEEE Chicago section a few months ago. A heat map showing the top 26 technical interest profile subjects (TIPS) of active IEEE Chicago section members, created using the above technologies along with specialized R language functions such as heatmap().