Tag: analysis

Announcing Jaspersoft 4.5

Message from  Jaspersoft

————————–

Announcing Jaspersoft 4.5:
Powerful Analytics for All Your Data

This new release provides a single, easy-to-use environment designed with the non-technical user in mind — delivering insight to data stored in relational, OLAP, and Big Data environments.New in Jaspersoft 4.5

Broad and Deep Big Data Connectivity
Intuitive drag and drop web UI for performing reporting and analysis against Hadoop, MongoDB, Cassandra, and many more.

Improved Ad Hoc Reporting and Analysis
Non-technical users can perform their own investigation.

Supercharged Analytic Performance
Enhanced push-down query processing and In-Memory Analysis engine improves response times for aggregation and summary queries.

Join us for an in-depth review and demo, showcasing the new features for self-service BI across any data source.

For more information on Jaspersoft 4.5, or any Jaspersoft solution, contact at sales@jaspersoft.com, or            415-348-2380      .

 

Download Jaspersoft 4.5 Today.

. Download your free 30 day evaluation trial now.

download now button

 

 

Data Documentation Initiative

Here is a nice initiative in standardizing data documentation for social sciences (which can be quite a relief to legions of analysts)

http://www.ddialliance.org/what

 

 

 

 

Benefits of DDI

The DDI facilitates:

  • Interoperability. Codebooks marked up using the DDI specification can be exchanged and transported seamlessly, and applications can be written to work with these homogeneous documents.
  • Richer content. The DDI was designed to encourage the use of a comprehensive set of elements to describe social science datasets as completely and as thoroughly as possible, thereby providing the potential data analyst with broader knowledge about a given collection.
  • Single document – multiple purposes. A DDI codebook contains all of the information necessary to produce several different types of output, including, for example, a traditional social science codebook, a bibliographic record, or SAS/SPSS/Stata data definition statements. Thus, the document may be repurposed for different needs and applications. Changes made to the core document will be passed along to any output generated.
  • On-line subsetting and analysis. Because the DDI markup extends down to the variable level and provides a standard uniform structure and content for variables, DDI documents are easily imported into on-line analysis systems, rendering datasets more readily usable for a wider audience.
  • Precision in searching. Since each of the elements in a DDI-compliant codebook is tagged in a specific way, field-specific searches across documents and studies are enabled. For example, a library of DDI codebooks could be searched to identify datasets covering protest demonstrations during the 1960s in specific states or countries.
Also see-
  1. http://www.ddialliance.org/Specification/DDI-Codebook/2.1/DTD/Documentation/DDI2-1-tree.html
  2. http://www.ddialliance.org/Specification/DDI-Lifecycle/3.1/

 

Webinar: Using R within Oracle #rstats

Webinar: Using R within Oracle — Nov 30, noon EST

==========================================
Oracle now supports the R open source statistical programming language. Come to this webinar to learn more about using R within an Oracle environment.

— URL for TechCast: https://stbeehive.oracle.com/bconf/confDetails?confID=334B:3BF0:owch:38893C00F42F38A1E0404498C8A6612B0004075AECF7&guest=true&confKey=608880
— Web Conference ID: 303397
— Web Conference Key: 608880
— Dialup:             1-866-682-4770      , ID 5548204, passcode 1234

After a steady rise in the past few years, in 2010 the open source data mining software R overtook other tools to become the tool used by more data miners (43%) than any other (http://www.rexeranalytics.com/Data-Miner-Survey-Results-2010.html).

Several analytic tool vendors have added R-integration to their software. However, Oracle is the largest company to throw their weight behind R. On October 3, Oracle unveiled their integration of R: Oracle R Enterprise (http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/features/features-oracle-r-enterprise-498732.html) as part of their Oracle Big Data Appliance announcement (http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/512001).

Oracle R Enterprise allows users to perform statistical analysis with advanced visualization on data stored in Oracle Database. Oracle R Enterprise enables scalable R solutions, while facilitating production deployment of R scripts and Hadoop based solutions, as well as integration of R results with Oracle BI Publisher and OBIEE dashboards.

This TechCast introduces the various Oracle R Enterprise components and features, along with R script demonstrations that interface with Oracle Database.

TechCast presenter: Mark Hornick, Senior Manager, Oracle Advanced Analytics Development.
This TechCast is part of the ongoing TechCasts series coordinated by Oracle BIWA: The BI, Warehousing and Analytics SIG (http://www.oracleBIWA.org).

Business Metrics

Business Metrics (a partial extract from my upcoming book “R for Business Analytics”

Business Metrics are important variables that are collected on a periodic basis to assess the health and sustainability of a business. They should have the following properties-

1) What is a Business Metric-The absence of collection of regular update of the business metric could cause business disruption by incorrect and incomplete decision making.

2) Cost of Business Metrics- The costs of collection, storage and updating of the business metric is less than the opportunity costs of wrong decision making cause by lack of information of that business metric.

3) Continuity in your Business Metrics- The business metrics are continuous in comparing across time periods and business units- if necessary the assumptions for smoothing the comparisons should be listed in the business metric presentation itself.

4) Simplify your Business Metrics– Business metrics can be derived as well from other business metrics. If necessary and to avoid clutter only the most important business metrics should be presented, or the metrics with the biggest deviation from past trends should be mentioned.

5) Normalize your Business Metrics- Scale of the business metric units should be comparable to other business metrics as well as significant to emphasize the difference in numbers.

6) Standardize your Business Metrics– Dimension of business metrics should be increased to enhance comparison and contrasts without enhancing complexity. This means adding an extra dimension for analysis rather than a 2 by 2 comparison, to add time /geography/ employee/business owner as a dimension .

HANA Oncolyzer

An interesting use case of technology for better health is HANA Oncolyzer at http://epic.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/Home/HanaOncolyzer

“Build on the newest in-memory technology the HANA Oncolyzer is able to analyze even huge amounts of medical data in shortest time”, says Dr. Alexander Zeier, Deputy Chair of EPIC. Research institutes and university hospital support from HANA Oncolyzer by building the basis for a flexible exchange of information about efficiency of medicines and treatments.

In near future, the tumor’s DNA of all cancer patients needs to be analyzed to support specific patient therapies. These analyses result in medical data in amount of multiple terabytes. “These data need to be analyzed regarding mutations and anomalies in real-time”, says Matthias Steinbrecher at SAP’s Innovation Center in Potsdam. As one of the aims the research prototype HANA Oncolyzer was developed at our chair in cooperation with SAP’s Innovation Center in Potsdam. “The ‘heart’ of our development builds the in-memory technology that supports the parallel analysis of million of data within seconds in main memory”, saysMatthieu Schapranow, Ph.D. cand. at the HPI.

and

research activities result in 500.000 or more data points per patient.

and

With the help of a dedicated iPad application medical doctors can access all data mobile at any location anytime.

 

Faster Distinct Values using Proc Freq in SAS

I recently stumbled upon the nlevels function in SAS. It is awesome in terms of processing speed, given that the alternative is PROC SQL, COUNT(DISTINCT) etc etc

Truly the fastest way to find uniqueness in vars is use the nlevels in PROC  FREQ – and why do we need to find levels in character variables- well to check for binary variables (2 values), constants (just 1 level), and simple data analysis stuff.

See this extract from-

ods output nlevels=levels;
proc freq data=good.sas nlevels;
tables _char_ /noprint;
quit;

Oracle adds R to Big Data Appliance -Use #Rstats

From the press release, Oracle gets on R and me too- NoSQL

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/512001

The Oracle Big Data Appliance is a new engineered system that includes an open source distribution of Apache™ Hadoop™, Oracle NoSQL Database, Oracle Data Integrator Application Adapter for Hadoop, Oracle Loader for Hadoop, and an open source distribution of R.

From

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/03/oracle_big_data_appliance/

the Big Data Appliance also includes the R programming language, a popular open source statistical-analysis tool. This R engine will integrate with 11g R2, so presumably if you want to do statistical analysis on unstructured data stored in and chewed by Hadoop, you will have to move it to Oracle after the chewing has subsided.

This approach to R-Hadoop integration is different from that announced last week between Revolution Analytics, the so-called Red Hat for stats that is extending and commercializing the R language and its engine, and Cloudera, which sells a commercial Hadoop setup called CDH3 and which was one of the early companies to offer support for Hadoop. Both Revolution Analytics and Cloudera now have Oracle as their competitor, which was no doubt no surprise to either.

In any event, the way they do it, the R engine is put on each node in the Hadoop cluster, and those R engines just see the Hadoop data as a native format that they can do analysis on individually. As statisticians do analyses on data sets, the summary data from all the nodes in the Hadoop cluster is sent back to their R workstations; they have no idea that they are using MapReduce on unstructured data.

Oracle did not supply configuration and pricing information for the Big Data Appliance, and also did not say when it would be for sale or shipping to customers

From

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/features/feature-oracle-nosql-database-505146.html

A Horizontally Scaled, Key-Value Database for the Enterprise
Oracle NoSQL Database is a commercial grade, general-purpose NoSQL database using a key/value paradigm. It allows you to manage massive quantities of data, cope with changing data formats, and submit simple queries. Complex queries are supported using Hadoop or Oracle Database operating upon Oracle NoSQL Database data.

Oracle NoSQL Database delivers scalable throughput with bounded latency, easy administration, and a simple programming model. It scales horizontally to hundreds of nodes with high availability and transparent load balancing. Customers might choose Oracle NoSQL Database to support Web applications, acquire sensor data, scale authentication services, or support online serves and social media.

and

from

http://siliconangle.com/blog/2011/09/30/oracle-adopting-open-source-r-to-connect-legacy-systems/

Oracle says it will integrate R with its Oracle Database. Other signs from Oracle show the deeper interest in using the statistical framework for integration with Hadoop to potentially speed statistical analysis. This has particular value with analyzing vast amounts of unstructured data, which has overwhelmed organizations, especially over the past year.

and

from

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/features/features-oracle-r-enterprise-498732.html

Oracle R Enterprise

Integrates the Open-Source Statistical Environment R with Oracle Database 11g
Oracle R Enterprise allows analysts and statisticians to run existing R applications and use the R client directly against data stored in Oracle Database 11g—vastly increasing scalability, performance and security. The combination of Oracle Database 11g and R delivers an enterprise-ready, deeply integrated environment for advanced analytics. Users can also use analytical sandboxes, where they can analyze data and develop R scripts for deployment while results stay managed inside Oracle Database.