Author: Ajay Ohri

https://linkedin.com/in/ajayohri

KNIME and Zementis shake hands

Two very good and very customer centric (and open source ) companies shook hands on a strategic partnership today.

Knime  www.knime.org and Zementis www.zementis.com .

Decision Stats has been covering these companies and both the products are amazing good, synch in very well thanks to the support of the PMML standard and lower costs considerably for the consumer. (http://www.decisionstats.com/2009/02/knime/ ) and http://www.decisionstats.com/2009/02/interview-michael-zeller-ceozementis/ )

While Knime has both a free personal as well as a commercial license , it supports R thanks to the PMML (www.dmg.org initiative ). Knime also supports R very well .

See http://www.knime.org/blog/export-and-convert-r-models-pmml-within-knime

The following example R script learns a decision tree based on the Iris-Data and exports this as PMML and as an R model which is understood by the R Predictor node:

# load the library for learning a tree model
library(rpart);
# load the pmml export library
library(pmml);
# use class column as predicted column to build decision tree
dt <- rpart(class~., R)
# export to PMML
r_pmml <- pmml(dt)
# write the PMML model to an export file
write(toString(r_pmml), file="C:/R.pmml")
# provide the native R model at the out-port
R<-dt

 

Zementis takes the total cost of ownership and total pain of creating scored models to something close to 1$ /hour thanks to using their proprietary ADAPA engine.

The big big Analytics Conference

The Predictive Analytics Conference (http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/ ) starts today in Hotel Nikko ,San Francisco . A whole who’s who of analytics experts is gathering there including SAS,SPSS ,SAP, Click Forensics ,Acxiom ,Amazon, Google and a big R user conference as well. It is really really huge so stay tuned for some exciting announcements happening there.

image

SAS , R and NYT – The Sequel

Here is a follow up article to the SAS vs. R articles by Ashlee V of the NYT.

 

The SAS Institute has borrowed a page from Sesame Street. It is now sponsoring the letter ‘R.’

Last month, I wrote an article about the rising popularity of the R programming language. The open-source software has turned into a favorite piece of technology for statisticians and other people looking to pull insights out of data.

On several levels, R represents a threat to SAS, which is the largest seller of commercial statistics software. Students at universities now learn R alongside SAS. In addition, the open-source nature of R allows the software to be tweaked at a pace that is hard for a commercial software maker to match.

All told, surging interest in the free R language could affect sales of SAS software, which can sell for thousands of dollars. Rather than running from the threat, SAS appears ready to try to understand R by adopting a more active role in its development.

You can read more at http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/16/sas-warms-to-open-source-one-letter-at-a-time/ or even by clicking on the Bits RSS feed in the sidebar on www.decisionstats.com

Ajay –

Note SAS is only opening up the SAS/IML product to integrate R’s matrix language capabilities. The base SAS software seems to be still not integrated with R and so is the statistics module SAS/Stat (SAS Institute sells in add on modules based on functionality and prices accordingly).

Many third party sources like http://www.minequest.com have created interfaces from Base SAS to R – they are priced at around 50 $ a piece.

An additional threat to SAS’s dominance is from the WPS software from a UK based company , World Programming http://www.teamwpc.co.uk/home (which has an alliance with IBM) . WPS software can read , and write in SAS language and read and write SAS datasets as well, and is priced at 660 $ almost one tenth of SAS Institute’s licenses.

The recession is also forcing many large license holders of statistical software (like Banks and Financial Services) to seek discounts and alternatives. SAS Institute remains the industry leader in analytics software after almost 35 years of dominance.

However this is a nice first step and it would be interesting to see follow up steps from SAS Institute rivals .

We can all go on our respective open source and closed source jets now.

comments from Anne H. Milley, director for technology product marketing at SAS, who relegated R to a limited role.

In the article, Ms. Milley said, “I think it addresses a niche market for high-end data analysts that want free, readily available code. We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.”

Offer for Decision Stats Readers

Here is an offer for Decision Stats readers , its a nice conference as per the website and if you are in Pharma forecasting – a reasonable one to try out.

Offer: A discounted ticket for the major Pharma Forecasting Excellence Summit? This €500 discount off any pass is only available this week

The European Pharma Forecasting Excellence Summit is the biggest and most exciting meeting-place for European Pharma Forecasting and Marketing executives like you. This year it’s on 20-22 April in Madrid.

What  is there:

  1. Relevance – We’ve spent months listening to your challenges to find the most relevant topics to help you keep ahead.
  2. Learn from our best ever line-up of pharma marketing speakers. Learn from world experts as well as your peers. We don’t invite anyone – only the most relevant for you with the best case studies.
  3. No sales pitches. This is an independent event.
  4. Meet people who may change your forecasting forever. No other event in Europe can provide you with 2 days of business focused networking with so many of the most influential people in pharma forecasting and marketing. Like many before you, you could make the connections that extend your network and change your career forever
  5. World exclusive case studies. No other event can deliver such knowledgeable insights and answers to key marketing challenges you face – more facts and less vague theory
  6. Discounts – the sooner you book the more you save
  7. Register Now. Don’t forget to download the brochure and see all the topics: Download Brochure

Whom to Contact:

Claire Poole

Head of Forecasting – EU

eyeforpharma

T: +44 (0) 207 375 7516

F: +44 (0) 207 375 7576

E: cpoole@eyeforpharma.com

The full ticket prices: 

https://secure.firstconf.com/pharma/forecasting09/register.htm

Visa: http://www.schengenvisa.cc/

Ning and Wordframe

If you have ever been invited to a Ning.com community , or been part of an e-group ,or been member of a LinkedIn Group of Facebook Group – you would know what online communities are all about. Here is a relatively new entrant than Ning.com (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ning) and it is called Wordframe

The plus points of Wordframe –

(Screenshot –Wordframe.com)

  • It has much better ,updated skins than Ning http://wordframe.com/product/community/skins/
  • It is much better ,well suited for creating content
  • It can use existing RSS feeds , and almost create a seamless focused community out in 5 minutes flat.
  • It can potentially be used within organizations in intranet installations as well for in house content management and corporate blogging.
  • It is soon going to be open source and give APIs away for third party development as well.

Ning.com is having many more users, and is quite good in flexibility in terms of Questions and Answers, Forums, Groups, Friend  Creation . It’s design is okay- some of the skins could do with a Web 2.0 makeover. Above all it is free.

 

They are actually aimed at different segments ( I hope !!) so while Ning encourages focused social networking , Wordframe is more on focused blog /content heavy networking. One of the best Ning sites I have seen is www.analyticbrdige.com and one of the best Wordframe sites I have seen is www.smartdatacollective.com ( for Data related people ) and www.socialmediatoday.com ( for Online Media related people).

image (Screenshot- Ning.com)

So do you have a blog – join one or both these communities , share your RSS feed and watch you visibility and viewership go up.

You are an occasional blogger and would rather read instead- join one or both these communities (that gives you commenting freedom), read other feeds and watch you understanding and knowledge go up.

 

Disclaimer- I have been Blogger of the Week on Social Media Today, and Member of the Month on Analytic Bridge (see the right sidebar on www.decisionstats.com ). In addition I have acted as a consultant and vendor for both of them in various parts of time and am acquainted to both the founders.

Ajay -Do I think there is value in joining them – Yes ! It has given me more knowledge and perspective than I could ever hope to get working on my own sitting in suburban Delhi, India.

As a Hindi saying ( apt on online networking would go)- 1 and 1 make 11. That in summary is the power of offline and online networking and Ning and Wordframe help you do that.

Catching Phishes

A great and free way to prevent your system and networks from phishing attacks is to route your DNS through www.opendns.com

The website says it all- Screenshot belongs to www.opendns.com .It handles more than 9.4 billion DNS requests daily.

  image

Nice and Impressive stuff – www.opendns.com  offers this service especially for DNS kind of attacks and botnet attacks specifically.By authenticating the website it thus helps your network from accidently downloading any malware or Trojans –right at the entry stage itself.

Modeling : R Code,Books and Documents

Here is an equivalent of Proc Genmod in R .

If the SAS language code is as below-

PROC GENMOD DATA=X;
CLASS FLH;
MODEL BS/OCCUPANCY = distcrop distfor flh distcrop*flh /D=B LINK=LOGIT
TYPE3; RUN;

 

Then the R language equivalent would be :

glm(bs/occupancy ~ distcrop*flh+distcrop,
   family=binomial(logit), weights=occupancy)
where flh needs to be a factor

 

Credit to Peter Dalgaard from the R-Help List 

Peter is also author of the splendid standard R book–

 

Speaking of books – Here is one R book I am looking /waiting for –

 

A similar named free document ( Introduction to statistical modelling in R by P.M.E.Altham, Statistical Laboratory, University of Cambridge)  is available here –

http://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~pat/redwsheets.pdf

It is a pretty nice reference document if Modelling is what you do, and R is what you need to explore.It was dated 5 February 2009, so its quite updated and new.You can also check Dr Altham’s home page for a lot of R resources.