Category: Analytics

I have watched Rapid Miner for quite some years including the R -extension, interview with founders , one of the first  marketplace for algorithms (or extensions to its statistical software) and use in sports analytics  has been much in the news lately.

They got funded, revamped the website , changed the name from Rapid-I to Rapid Miner and are now announcing version 6 of their flagship software soon.

http://www.zdnet.com/rapid-i-gets-funded-re-brands-as-rapidminer-7000022757/

 A well-kept secret of the Analytics/Data Mining world may get some of the spotlight now, with a cool $5M in its pocket.

a successful $5M Series A funding round, with participation from European firms Earlybird Venture Capital and Open Ocean Capital (the latter firm having a strong pedigree from the team behind the MySQL relational database).

It has easily been the first open source statistical tool with Visual Programming ( something R is still yet to have despite efforts by RedR, Analytic Flow et al) and more importantly has a huge stack of enterprise clients.

http://rapidminer.com/products/rapidminer-studio/

RapidMiner 6 will have brand-new templates for churn reduction, sentiment analysis, predictive maintenance and direct marketing.  A data analysis toolbox has never been more user-friendly or more powerful.

But best of all- they get a much easier training academy in place, and I am personally going to finally master it ( even though I have played a bit with it before

I do hope they make a MOOC (since the software is open source and free to download – how about some very easy to do self learning online tutorials)!

http://rapidminer.com/learning/training/

Introduction to Data Mining and Predictive Analytics with RapidMiner Studio and Server, December 3^rd and 4^th.
This course is a two-day introduction to the foundations of data mining, business analytics, and RapidMiner software. Participants will gain a complete understanding of how RapidMiner Studio and RapidMiner Server work and are used.

This course is the perfect preparation for the Image Mining training course.

Foundations of image processing, analysis and mining with the “Multimedia Mining-Image” (MUMI-Image) extension, December 5^th and 6th.
This course is a two-day training on the foundations of image processing, analysis and mining with the “Multimedia Mining – Image” (MUMI-Image) extension for RapidMiner. After this training course, participants will have a complete understanding of how image mining analysis can be performed within RapidMiner Studio and Server, combining image processing techniques with the available data mining methods and data processing capabilities. Practical exercises ensure that the participants will be able to perform their own image analysis at the end of the class.

Blogger Disclosure- Rapid Miner has been a sponsor of Decisionstats.com for several years . I also like the software a lot!)

Apparently, in Asia companies have been able to offer and advertise SAS Training , by inserting the language of SAS cleverly, hiding the disclaimers in the website map maze, an reassuring students that they can get jobs even in bonafide SAS Institute licenses client locations by defacto learning “the SAS language” without paying for the expensive SAS licensing.

This marks a double blow for the Institute , as one one hand WPS licensing erodes its margin by competitive discounting. On the other hand the lucrative SAS Language Training (and publishing) market is decimated in emerging market economies by SAS language clones.

I write this in dismay as I was one of the original authors of this article which was even referred to in the WPS judgement

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAS_language ( the edit history is even more fascinating if you want to see it!!)

Students, if you wanna learn SAS or language of SAS – do refer to this.

http://support.sas.com/training/

Anything else is a legal grey area compounded by the curious  shyness of SAS legal to defend a 40 year old venerated analytics brand, by ceding ground through out the world and across domains

A simple analysis of Web logs in SAS Online Doc would prove how this is exploited even by sellers of SAS language clone software.

As the difference in SAS and WPS pricing is compounded on server licenses, companies in Asia have found the best thing to do is get a WPS server license and in fact offer it for training (or analysis) like a time shared cloud solution to multiple customers at the same time

It is an interesting thing to watch- because SAS Institute remains one of the lost holdouts on the West Coast to the Stanford mafia.

unrelated picture – a famous Bollywood movie

 

A quick look at http://crisislanding.appspot.com/crisismap/weather_and_events shows how big the storm in Philippines is

Planet Python is an excellent site for people keeping an eye on Python http://planet.python.org/ – you can grab the Feedburner RSS feed here http://feeds.feedburner.com/python/PMUk

With almost 300 plus feeds flowing in, this is the Pythonic version of R Bloggers (with hat tip to R bloggers founder, Tal G for pointing me to this site). Note I have written before on FOAS   and it’s Pythonic counterpart NumFocus – those are basically foundations  for encouraging language development and usage while Planet Python and R bloggers are blog aggregators

The Planet Python site has no ads, and is actually supported by the Python Official Website. It also has an OPML feed in case you want to replicate it easily –http://planet.python.org/opml.xml

However the lack of ads is a dual edged sword as it hurts startups, corporates and trainers in the Python ecosystem. Also there seems no easy way to get the newsletter in a daily email.

Do you blog on, write on or read Python- here is Planet Python

 

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