When you talk about statistics, data mining, and machine learning, many people, especially those working in academic areas, think about R. R is the language that the engine that executes the code. You can use different R distributions, or versions of R engines and development tools; however, there is only one basic R language. Of course, to use it, you need to learn how to program in this language.

Statistics, data mining, and machine learning terms are very similar. You won't make a big mistake if you use them as synonyms. Statistics is the science of analyzing data collections, expressing the relationships as mathematical functions, and presenting and interpreting the results. In statistics, you usually work with sample data, or samples, because the population data, or the census, is not available to you. Data-mining analysis techniques are often derived from statistics, but also from artificial intelligence, biology, and other scientific areas. You use these techniques...