Using R to choose which conference

Within most fields of human endeavour there is a cycle of conferences, seminars and so on.  One challenge is to get the maximum value in terms of seeing speakers and topics of interest while minimising the time spent on the conference.This got me to thinking about using R to perform an analysis of the speakers and topics of two conferences and to establish which conference to attend. 


In order to make this fair, I decided to create a dummy data set for two conferences.  I did not want to use real data as the results may not be pleasing for some people.

So, stage one was to simply evaluate

1. the number of speakers at each conference
2. the number of cases of the same person speaking at both.
3. the number of cases of the same person speaking more than once at a conference 

The next steps are to consider the speakers and their material.

I have been considering a time series approach - to look at each speaker and see if they are going to talk about the same topics as the past or if they have fresh material.

All just a bit of fun.  At a later date I will put all of this on github along with some tools to get data from real conference websites