Tag: Business

Predictive Analytics World Conference –New York City and London, UK

Please use the following code  to get a 15% discount on the 2 Day Conference Pass:  AJAYNY11.

Predictive Analytics World Conference –New York City and London, UK

October 17-21, 2011 – New York City, NY (pawcon.com/nyc)
Nov 30 – Dec 1, 2011 – London, UK (pawcon.com/london)

Predictive Analytics World (pawcon.com) is the business-focused event for predictive analytics
professionals, managers and commercial practitioners, covering today’s commercial deployment of
predictive analytics, across industries and across software vendors. The conference delivers case
studies, expertise, and resources to achieve two objectives:

1) Bigger wins: Strengthen the business impact delivered by predictive analytics

2) Broader capabilities: Establish new opportunities with predictive analytics

Case Studies: How the Leading Enterprises Do It

Predictive Analytics World focuses on concrete examples of deployed predictive analytics. The leading
enterprises have signed up to tell their stories, so you can hear from the horse’s mouth precisely how
Fortune 500 analytics competitors and other top practitioners deploy predictive modeling, and what
kind of business impact it delivers.

PAW NEW YORK CITY 2011

PAW’s NYC program is the richest and most diverse yet, featuring over 40 sessions across three tracks
– including both X and Y tracks, and an “Expert/Practitioner” track — so you can witness how predictive
analytics is applied at major companies.

PAW NYC’s agenda covers hot topics and advanced methods such as ensemble models, social data,
search marketing, crowdsourcing, blackbox trading, fraud detection, risk management, survey analysis,
and other innovative applications that benefit organizations in new and creative ways.

WORKSHOPS: PAW NYC also features five full-day pre- and post-conference workshops that
complement the core conference program. Workshop agendas include advanced predictive modeling
methods, hands-on training, an intro to R (the open source analytics system), and enterprise decision
management.

For more see http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/newyork/2011/

PAW LONDON 2011

PAW London’s agenda covers hot topics and advanced methods such as risk management, uplift
(incremental lift) modeling, open source analytics, and crowdsourcing data mining. Case study
presentations cover campaign targeting, churn modeling, next-best-offer, selecting marketing channels,
global analytics deployment, email marketing, HR candidate search, and other innovative applications
that benefit organizations in new and creative ways.

Join PAW and access the best keynotes, sessions, workshops, exposition, expert panel, live demos,
networking coffee breaks, reception, birds-of-a-feather lunches, brand-name enterprise leaders, and

industry heavyweights in the business.

For more see http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/london

CROSS-INDUSTRY APPLICATIONS

Predictive Analytics World is the only conference of its kind, delivering vendor-neutral sessions across
verticals such as banking, financial services, e-commerce, education, government, healthcare, high
technology, insurance, non-profits, publishing, social gaming, retail and telecommunications

And PAW covers the gamut of commercial applications of predictive analytics, including response
modeling, customer retention with churn modeling, product recommendations, fraud detection, online
marketing optimization, human resource decision-making, law enforcement, sales forecasting, and
credit scoring.

Why bring together such a wide range of endeavors? No matter how you use predictive analytics, the
story is the same: Predicatively scoring customers optimizes business performance. Predictive analytics
initiatives across industries leverage the same core predictive modeling technology, share similar project
overhead and data requirements, and face common process challenges and analytical hurdles.

RAVE REVIEWS:

“Hands down, best applied, analytics conference I have ever attended. Great exposure to cutting-edge
predictive techniques and I was able to turn around and apply some of those learnings to my work
immediately. I’ve never been able to say that after any conference I’ve attended before!”

Jon Francis
Senior Statistician
T-Mobile

Read more: Articles and blog entries about PAW can be found at http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/
pressroom.php

VENDORS. Meet the vendors and learn about their solutions, software and service. Discover the best
predictive analytics vendors available to serve your needs – learn what they do and see how they
compare

COLLEAGUES. Mingle, network and hang out with your best and brightest colleagues. Exchange
experiences over lunch, coffee breaks and the conference reception connecting with those professionals
who face the same challenges as you.

GET STARTED. If you’re new to predictive analytics, kicking off a new initiative, or exploring new ways
to position it at your organization, there’s no better place to get your bearings than Predictive Analytics
World. See what other companies are doing, witness vendor demos, participate in discussions with the
experts, network with your colleagues and weigh your options!

For more information:
http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com

View videos of PAW Washington DC, Oct 2010 — now available on-demand:
http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/online-video.php

What is predictive analytics? See the Predictive Analytics Guide:
http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/predictive_analytics.php

If you’d like our informative event updates, sign up at:
http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/signup-us.php

To sign up for the PAW group on LinkedIn, see:
http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/1005097

For inquiries e-mail regsupport@risingmedia.com or call (717) 798-3495.

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Augustus- a PMML model producer and consumer. Scoring engine.

A Bold GNU Head
Image via Wikipedia

I just checked out this new software for making PMML models. It is called Augustus and is created by the Open Data Group (http://opendatagroup.com/) , which is headed by Robert Grossman, who was the first proponent of using R on Amazon Ec2.

Probably someone like Zementis ( http://adapasupport.zementis.com/ ) can use this to further test , enhance or benchmark on the Ec2. They did have a joint webinar with Revolution Analytics recently.

https://code.google.com/p/augustus/

Recent News

  • Augustus v 0.4.3.1 has been released
  • Added a guide (pdf) for including Augustus in the Windows System Properties.
  • Updated the install documentation.
  • Augustus 2010.II (Summer) release is available. This is v 0.4.2.0. More information is here.
  • Added performance discussion concerning the optional cyclic garbage collection.

See Recent News for more details and all recent news.

Augustus

Augustus is a PMML 4-compliant scoring engine that works with segmented models. Augustus is designed for use with statistical and data mining models. The new release provides Baseline, Tree and Naive-Bayes producers and consumers.

There is also a version for use with PMML 3 models. It is able to produce and consume models with 10,000s of segments and conforms to a PMML draft RFC for segmented models and ensembles of models. It supports Baseline, Regression, Tree and Naive-Bayes.

Augustus is written in Python and is freely available under the GNU General Public License, version 2.

See the page Which version is right for me for more details regarding the different versions.

PMML

Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML) is an XML mark up language to describe statistical and data mining models. PMML describes the inputs to data mining models, the transformations used to prepare data for data mining, and the parameters which define the models themselves. It is used for a wide variety of applications, including applications in finance, e-business, direct marketing, manufacturing, and defense. PMML is often used so that systems which create statistical and data mining models (“PMML Producers”) can easily inter-operate with systems which deploy PMML models for scoring or other operational purposes (“PMML Consumers”).

Change Detection using Augustus

For information regarding using Augustus with Change Detection and Health and Status Monitoring, please see change-detection.

Open Data

Open Data Group provides management consulting services, outsourced analytical services, analytic staffing, and expert witnesses broadly related to data and analytics. It has experience with customer data, supplier data, financial and trading data, and data from internal business processes.

It has staff in Chicago and San Francisco and clients throughout the U.S. Open Data Group began operations in 2002.

Overview

The above example contains plots generated in R of scoring results from Augustus. Each point on the graph represents a use of the scoring engine and a chart is an aggregation of multiple Augustus runs. A Baseline (Change Detection) model was used to score data with multiple segments.

Typical Use

Augustus is typically used to construct models and score data with models. Augustus includes a dedicated application for creating, or producing, predictive models rendered as PMML-compliant files. Scoring is accomplished by consuming PMML-compliant files describing an appropriate model. Augustus provides a dedicated application for scoring data with four classes of models, Baseline (Change Detection) Models, Tree Models, Regression Models and Naive Bayes Models. The typical model development and use cycle with Augustus is as follows:

  1. Identify suitable data with which to construct a new model.
  2. Provide a model schema which proscribes the requirements for the model.
  3. Run the Augustus producer to obtain a new model.
  4. Run the Augustus consumer on new data to effect scoring.

Separate consumer and producer applications are supplied for Baseline (Change Detection) models, Tree models, Regression models and for Naive Bayes models. The producer and consumer applications require configuration with XML-formatted files. The specification of the configuration files and model schema are detailed below. The consumers provide for some configurability of the output but users will often provide additional post-processing to render the output according to their needs. A variety of mechanisms exist for transmitting data but user’s may need to provide their own preprocessing to accommodate their particular data source.

In addition to the producer and consumer applications, Augustus is conceptually structured and provided with libraries which are relevant to the development and use of Predictive Models. Broadly speaking, these consist of components that address the use of PMML and components that are specific to Augustus.

Post Processing

Augustus can accommodate a post-processing step. While not necessary, it is often useful to

  • Re-normalize the scoring results or performing an additional transformation.
  • Supplements the results with global meta-data such as timestamps.
  • Formatting of the results.
  • Select certain interesting values from the results.
  • Restructure the data for use with other applications.
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Oracle launches XBRL extension for financial domains

What is XBRL and how does it work?

http://www.xbrl.org/HowXBRLWorks/

How XBRL Works
XBRL is a member of the family of languages based on XML, or Extensible Markup Language, which is a standard for the electronic exchange of data between businesses and on the internet.  Under XML, identifying tags are applied to items of data so that they can be processed efficiently by computer software.

XBRL is a powerful and flexible version of XML which has been defined specifically to meet the requirements of business and financial information.  It enables unique identifying tags to be applied to items of financial data, such as ‘net profit’.  However, these are more than simple identifiers.  They provide a range of information about the item, such as whether it is a monetary item, percentage or fraction.  XBRL allows labels in any language to be applied to items, as well as accounting references or other subsidiary information.

XBRL can show how items are related to one another.  It can thus represent how they are calculated.  It can also identify whether they fall into particular groupings for organisational or presentational purposes.  Most importantly, XBRL is easily extensible, so companies and other organisations can adapt it to meet a variety of special requirements.

The rich and powerful structure of XBRL allows very efficient handling of business data by computer software.  It supports all the standard tasks involved in compiling, storing and using business data.  Such information can be converted into XBRL by suitable mapping processes or generated in XBRL by software.  It can then be searched, selected, exchanged or analysed by computer, or published for ordinary viewing.

also see

http://www.xbrl.org/Example1/

 

 

 

and from-

http://www.oracle.com/us/dm/xbrlextension-354972.html?msgid=3-3856862107

With more than 7,000 new U.S. companies facing extensible business reporting language (XBRL) filing mandates in 2011, Oracle has released a free XBRL extension on top of the latest release of Oracle Database.

Oracle’s XBRL extension leverages Oracle Database 11g Release 2 XML to manage the collection, validation, storage, and analysis of XBRL data. It enables organizations to create one or more back-end XBRL repositories based on Oracle Database, providing secure XBRL storage and query-ability with a set of XBRL-specific services.

In addition, the extension integrates easily with Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition to provide analytics, plus interactive development environments (IDEs) and design tools for creating and editing XBRL taxonomies.

The Other Side of XBRL
“While the XBRL mandate continues to grow, the feedback we keep hearing from the ‘other side’ of XRBL—regulators, academics, financial analysts, and investors—is that they lack sufficient tools and historic data to leverage the full potential of XBRL,” says John O’Rourke, vice president of product marketing, Oracle.

However, O’Rourke says this is quickly changing as XBRL mandates enter their third year—and more and more companies have to comply. While the new extension should be attractive to organizations that produce XBRL filings, O’Rourke expects it will prove particularly valuable to regulators, stock exchanges, universities, and other organizations that need to collect, analyze, and disseminate XBRL-based filings.

Outsourcing, a Bolt-on Solution, or Integrated XBRL Tagging
Until recently, reporting organizations had to choose between expensive third-party outsourcing or manual, in-house tagging with bolt-on solutions— both of which introduce the possibility of error.

In response, Oracle launched Oracle Hyperion Disclosure Management, which provides an XBRL tagging solution that is integrated with the financial close and reporting process for fast and reliable XBRL report submission—without relying on third-party providers. The solution enables organizations to

  • Author regulatory filings in Microsoft Office and “hot link” them directly to financial reporting systems so they can be easily updated
  • Graphically perform XBRL tagging at several levels—within Microsoft Office, within EPM system reports, or in the data source metadata
  • Modify or extend XBRL taxonomies before the mapping process, as well as set up multiple taxonomies
  • Create and validate final XBRL instance documents before submission

 

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Top Ten Graphs for Business Analytics -Pie Charts (1/10)

I have not been really posting or writing worthwhile on the website for some time, as I am still busy writing ” R for Business Analytics” which I hope to get out before year end. However while doing research for that, I came across many types of graphs and what struck me is the actual usage of some kinds of graphs is very different in business analytics as compared to statistical computing.

The criterion of top ten graphs is as follows-

1) Usage-The order in which they appear is not strictly in terms of desirability but actual frequency of usage. So a frequently used graph like box plot would be recommended above say a violin plot.

2) Adequacy- Data Visualization paradigms change over time- but the need for accurate conveying of maximum information in a minium space without overwhelming reader or misleading data perceptions.

3) Ease of creation- A simpler graph created by a single function is more preferrable to writing 4-5 lines of code to create an elaborate graph.

4) Aesthetics– Aesthetics is relative and  in addition studies have shown visual perception varies across cultures and geographies. However , beauty is universally appreciated and a pretty graph is sometimes and often preferred over a not so pretty graph. Here being pretty is in both visual appeal without compromising perceptual inference from graphical analysis.

 

so When do we use a bar chart versus a line graph versus a pie chart? When is a mosaic plot more handy and when should histograms be used with density plots? The list tries to capture most of these practicalities.

Let me elaborate on some specific graphs-

1) Pie Chart- While Pie Chart is not really used much in stats computing, and indeed it is considered a misleading example of data visualization especially the skewed or two dimensional charts. However when it comes to evaluating market share at a particular instance, a pie chart is simple to understand. At the most two pie charts are needed for comparing two different snapshots, but three or more pie charts on same data at different points of time is definitely a bad case.

In R you can create piechart, by just using pie(dataset$variable)

As per official documentation, pie charts are not  recommended at all.

http://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-patched/library/graphics/html/pie.html

Pie charts are a very bad way of displaying information. The eye is good at judging linear measures and bad at judging relative areas. A bar chart or dot chart is a preferable way of displaying this type of data.

Cleveland (1985), page 264: “Data that can be shown by pie charts always can be shown by a dot chart. This means that judgements of position along a common scale can be made instead of the less accurate angle judgements.” This statement is based on the empirical investigations of Cleveland and McGill as well as investigations by perceptual psychologists.

—-

Despite this, pie charts are frequently used as an important metric they inevitably convey is market share. Market share remains an important analytical metric for business.

The pie3D( ) function in the plotrix package provides 3D exploded pie charts.An exploded pie chart remains a very commonly used (or misused) chart.

From http://lilt.ilstu.edu/jpda/charts/chart%20tips/Chartstip%202.htm#Rules

we see some rules for using Pie charts.

 

  1. Avoid using pie charts.
  2. Use pie charts only for data that add up to some meaningful total.
  3. Never ever use three-dimensional pie charts; they are even worse than two-dimensional pies.
  4. Avoid forcing comparisons across more than one pie chart

 

From the R Graph Gallery (a slightly outdated but still very comprehensive graphical repository)

http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/RGraphGallery.php?graph=4

par(bg="gray")
pie(rep(1,24), col=rainbow(24), radius=0.9)
title(main="Color Wheel", cex.main=1.4, font.main=3)
title(xlab="(test)", cex.lab=0.8, font.lab=3)
(Note adding a grey background is quite easy in the basic graphics device as well without using an advanced graphical package)

 

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The impact of currency fluctuations on outsourcing businesses globally

 

The impact of currency fluctuations on outsourcing businesses globally.

If you have a current offshore team in a different country/currency zone then you may find that the significant cost savings from outsourcing have vanished due to currency fluctuations that occur for reasons like earthquakes, war or oil- something which is outside the core competency of your business corporation. As off shoring companies incur cost in local currencies but gain revenue in American Dollars and Euro (mostly), they pass on these fluctuating costs to their customers but rarely pass along discounts on existing contracts. Sometimes the offshoring contract actually gains from currency fluctuations.The Indian rupee has fluctuated from  43.62 Rupees per USD (04-01-2005) to 48.58 (12-31-2008) to the current value of 44.65.This makes for a volatility component of almost 10 percentage points to the revenue and profit margins of an off shoring vendor. Inflation in India has been growing at 8.5 % and the annual increase in salaries has been around 10-15 % for the past few years. Offshoring vendors have been known to cut back on quality in recruitment when costs have risen historically, and the current attrition rate in Indian ITES is almost 17%.
This raises important questions for companies going for global bids for the offshoring contracts. Should macroeconomic indicators like currency fluctuations, wage-inflation be part of the request for proposal process (RFP). Would vendors be comfortable in disclosing the ratio of salary costs to billing revenue. Should dips in service quality be penalized by customer. Most importantly, while going in for a multi year contract, the projection of fore-casted savings may vary greatly due to extraneous factors.
(this article was originally written for and published by http://www.indiasoftwarebrief.com/ in their daily newsletter and their socail media channel- see http://www.linkedin.com/groups/impact-currency-fluctuations-on-outsourcing-3825591.S.48411960)

 

 

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IBM and Revolution team to create new in-database R

From the Press Release at http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/news-events/news-room/2011/revolution-analytics-netezza-partnership.php

Under the terms of the agreement, the companies will work together to create a version of Revolution’s software that takes advantage of IBM Netezza’s i-class technology so that Revolution R Enterprise can run in-database in an optimal fashion.

About IBM

For information about IBM Netezza, please visit: http://www.netezza.com.
For Information on IBM Information Management, please visit: http://www.ibm.com/software/data/information-on-demand/
For information on IBM Business Analytics, please visit the online press kit: http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/presskit/27163.wss
Follow IBM and Analytics on Twitter: http://twitter.com/ibmbizanalytics
Follow IBM analytics on Tumblr: http://smarterplanet.tumblr.com/tagged/new_intelligence
IBM YouTube Analytics Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/ibmbusinessanalytics
For information on IBM Smarter Systems: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/smarter/

About Revolution Analytics

Revolution Analytics is the leading commercial provider of software and services based on the open source R project for statistical computing.  Led by predictive analytics pioneer Norman Nie, the company brings high performance, productivity and enterprise readiness to R, the most powerful statistics language in the world. The company’s flagship Revolution R product is designed to meet the production needs of large organizations in industries such as finance, life sciences, retail, manufacturing and media.  Used by over 2 million analysts in academia and at cutting-edge companies such as Google, Bank of America and Acxiom, R has emerged as the standard of innovation in statistical analysis. Revolution Analytics is committed to fostering the continued growth of the R community through sponsorship of the Inside-R.org community site, funding worldwide R user groups and offers free licenses of Revolution R Enterprise to everyone in academia.


Netezza, an IBM Company, is the global leader in data warehouse, analytic and monitoring appliances that dramatically simplify high-performance analytics across an extended enterprise. IBM Netezza’s technology enables organizations to process enormous amounts of captured data at exceptional speed, providing a significant competitive and operational advantage in today’s data-intensive industries, including digital media, energy, financial services, government, health and life sciences, retail and telecommunications.

The IBM Netezza TwinFin® appliance is built specifically to analyze petabytes of detailed data significantly faster than existing data warehouse options, and at a much lower total cost of ownership. It stores, filters and processes terabytes of records within a single unit, analyzing only the relevant information for each query.

Using Revolution R Enterprise & Netezza Together

Revolution Analytics and IBM Netezza have announced a partnership to integrate Revolution R Enterprise and the IBM Netezza TwinFin  Data Warehouse Appliance. For the first time, customers seeking to run high performance and full-scale predictive analytics from within a data warehouse platform will be able to directly leverage the power of the open source R statistics language. The companies are working together to create a version of Revolution’s software that takes advantage of IBM Netezza’s i-class technology so that Revolution R Enterprise can run in-database in an optimal fashion.

This partnership integrates Revolution R Enterprise with IBM Netezza’s high performance data warehouse and advanced analytics platform to help organizations combat the challenges that arise as complexity and the scale of data grow.  By moving the analytics processing next to the data, this integration will minimize data movement – a significant bottleneck, especially when dealing with “Big Data”.  It will deliver high performance on large scale data, while leveraging the latest innovations in analytics.

With Revolution R Enterprise for IBM Netezza, advanced R computations are available for rapid analysis of hundreds of terabyte-class data volumes — and can deliver 10-100x performance improvements at a fraction of the cost compared to traditional analytics vendors.

Additional Resources


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