Tag: data mining

Moving data between Windows and Ubuntu VMWare partition

I use Windows 7 on my laptop (it came pre-installed) and Ubuntu using the VMWare Player. What are the advantages of using VM Player instead of creating a dual-boot system? Well I can quickly shift from Ubuntu to Windows and bakc again without restarting my computer everytime. Using this approach allows me to utilize software that run only on Windows and run software like Rattle, the R data mining GUI, that are much easier installed on Linux.

However if your statistical software is on your Virtual Disk , and your data is on your Windows disk, you need a way to move data from Windows to Ubuntu.

The solution to this as per Ubuntu forums is –http://communities.vmware.com/thread/55242

Open My Computer, browse to the folder you want to share.  Right-click on the folder, select Properties.  Sharing tab.  Select the radio button to “Share this Folder”.  Change the default generated name if you wish; add a description if you wish.  Click the Permissions button to modify the security settings of what users can read/write to the share.

On the Linux side, it depends on the distro, the shell, and the window manager.

Well Ubuntu makes it really easy to configure the Linux steps to move data within Windows and Linux partitions.

 

NEW UPDATE-

VMmare makes it easy to share between your Windows (host) and Linux (guest) OS

 

Step 1

and step 2

Do this

 

and

Start the Wizard

when you finish the wizard and share a drive or folder- hey where do I see my shared ones-

 

see this folder in Linux- /mnt/hgfs (bingo!)

Hacker HW – Make this folder //mnt/hgfs a shortcut in Places your Ubuntu startup

Hacker Hw 2-

Upload using an anon email your VM dark data to Ubuntu one

Delete VM

Purge using software XX

Reinstall VM and bring back backup

 

Note time to do this

 

 

 

-General Sharing in Windows

 

 

Just open the Network tab in Ubuntu- see screenshots below-

Windows will now ask your Ubuntu user for login-

Once Logged in Windows from within Ubuntu Vmware, this is what happens

You see a tab called “users on “windows username”- pc appear on your Ubuntu Desktop  (see top right of the screenshot)

If you double click it- you see your windows path

You can now just click and drag data between your windows and linux partitions , just the way you do it in Windows .

So based on this- if you want to build  decision trees, artifical neural networks, regression models, and even time series models for zero capital expenditure- you can use both Ubuntu/R without compromising on your IT policy of Windows only in your organization (there is a shortage of Ubuntu trained IT administrators in the enterprise world)

Revised Installation Procedure for utilizing both Ubuntu /R/Rattle data mining on your Windows PC.

Using VMWare to build a free data mining system in R, as well as isolate your analytics system (thus using both Linux and Windows without overburdening your machine)

First Time

  1. http://downloads.vmware.com/d/info/desktop_end_user_computing/vmware_player/4_0Download and Install
  2. http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/downloadDownload Only
  3. Create New Virtual Image in VM Ware Player
  4. Applications—–Terminal——sudo apt get-install R (to download and install)
  5.                                          sudo R (to open R)
  6. Once R is opened type this  —-install.packages(rattle)—– This will install rattle
  7. library(rattle) will load Rattle—–
  8. rattle() will open the GUI—-
Getting Data from Host to Guest VM
Next Time
  1. Go to VM Player
  2. Open the VM
  3. sudo R in terminal to bring up R
  4. library(rattle) within R
  5. rattle()
At this point even if you dont know any Linux and dont know any R, you can create data mining models using the Rattle GUI (and time series model using E pack in the R Commander GUI) – What can Rattle do in data mining? See this slideshow-http://www.decisionstats.com/data-mining-with-r-gui-rattle-rstats/
If Google Docs is banned as per your enterprise organizational IT policy of having Windows Explorer only- well you can see these screenshots http://rattle.togaware.com/rattle-screenshots.html

Data Mining with R GUI -Rattle #Rstats

Why is RATTLE my favorite R package?
because it allows data mining in a very nice interface.
Complicated software need not have complicated interfaces.
Have a look-

(Note- download rattle from http://rattle.togaware.com)

For better visibility please click the full screen button or click the second pps below- automatically advances every 5 secs

How to make an analytics project?

Some of the process methodologies I have used and been exposed to while making analytics projects are-1) DMAIC/Six Sigma

While Six Sigma was initially a quality control system, it has also been very succesful in managing projects. The various stages of an analytical project can be divided using the DMAIC methodology.

DMAIC stands for

  • Define
  • Measure
  • Analyze
  • Improve
  • Control

Related to this is DMADV, ( “Design For Six Sigma”)

  • Define
  • Measure and identify CTQs
  • Analyze
  • Design
  • Verify

2) CRISP
CRISP-DM stands for Cross Industry Standard Process for Data Mining

CRISP-DM breaks the process of data mining into six major phases- and these can be used for business analytics projects as well.

  • Business Understanding
  • Data Understanding
  • Data Preparation
  • Modeling
  • Evaluation
  • Deployment

3) SEMMA
SEMMA  stands for

  • sample
  • explore
  • modify
  • model
  • assess

4) ISO 9001

ISO 9001 is a certification as well as a philosophy for making a Quality Management System to measure , reduce and eliminate error and customer complaints. Any customer complaint or followup has to be treated as an error, logged, and investigated for control.

5) LEAN
LEAN is a philosophy to eliminate Wastage in a process. Applying LEAN principles to analytics projects helps a lot in eliminating project bottlenecks, technology compatibility issues and data quality resolution. I think LEAN would be great in data quality issues, and IT infrastructure design because that is where the maximum waste is observed in analytics projects.

6) Demings Plan Do Check Act cycle.

Google Plus API- statistical text mining anyone

For the past year and two I have noticed a lot of statistical analysis using #rstats /R on unstructured text generated in real time by the social network Twitter. From an analytic point of view , Google Plus is an interesting social network , as it is a social network that is new and arrived after the analytic tools are relatively refined. It is thus an interesting use case for evolution of people behavior measured globally AFTER analytic tools in text mining are evolved and we can thus measure how people behave and that behavior varies as the social network and its user interface evolves.

And it would also be  a nice benchmark to do sentiment analysis across multiple social networks.

Some interesting use cases of using Twitter that have been used in R.

  • Using R to search Twitter for analysis
http://www.franklincenterhq.org/2429/using-r-to-search-twitter-for-analysis/
  • Text Data Mining With Twitter And R
  • TWITTER FROM R… SURE, WHY NOT!
  • A package called TwitteR
  • slides from my R tutorial on Twitter text mining #rstats
  • Generating graphs of retweets and @-messages on Twitter using R and Gephi
But with Google Plus API now active

The Console lets you see and manage the following project information:

  • Activated APIs – Activate one or more APIs to enable traffic monitoring, filtering, and billing, and API-specific pages for your project. Read more about activating APIs here.
  • Traffic information – The Console reports traffic information for each activated API. Additionally, you can cap or filter usage by API. Read more about traffic reporting and request filtering here.
  • Billing information – When you activate billing, your activated APIs can exceed the courtesy usage quota. Usage fees are billed to the Google Checkout account that you specify. Read more about billing here.
  • Project keys – Each project is identified by either an API key or an OAuth 2.0 token. Use this key/token in your API requests to identify the project, in order to record usage data, enforce your filtering restrictions, and bill usage to the proper project. You can use the Console to generate or revoke API keys or OAuth 2.0 certificates to use in your application. Read more about keys here.
  • Team members – You can specify additional members with read, write, or ownership access to this project’s Console page. Read more about team members here.
Google+ API Courtesy limit: 1,000 queries/day

Effective limits:

API Per-User Limit Used Courtesy Limit
Google+ API 5.0 requests/second/user 0% 1,000 queries/day
API Calls
Most of the Google+ API follows a RESTful API design, meaning that you use standard HTTP methods to retrieve and manipulate resources. For example, to get the profile of a user, you might send an HTTP request like:

GET https://www.googleapis.com/plus/v1/people/userId

Common Parameters

Different API methods require parameters to be passed either as part of the URL path or as query parameters. Additionally, there are a few parameters that are common to all API endpoints. These are all passed as optional query parameters.

Parameter Name

Value

Description

callback

string

Specifies a JavaScript function that will be passed the response data for using the API with JSONP.

fields

string

Selector specifying which fields to include in a partial response.

key

string

API key. Your API key identifies your project and provides you with API access, quota, and reports. Required unless you provide an OAuth 2.0 token.

access_token

string

OAuth 2.0 token for the current user. Learn more about OAuth.

prettyPrint

boolean

If set to “true”, data output will include line breaks and indentation to make it more readable. If set to “false”, unnecessary whitespace is removed, reducing the size of the response. Defaults to “true”.

userIp

string

Identifies the IP address of the end user for whom the API call is being made. This allows per-user quotas to be enforced when calling the API from a server-side application. Learn more about Capping Usage.

Data Formats

Resources in the Google+ API are represented using JSON data formats. For example, retrieving a user’s profile may result in a response like:

{
  "kind": "plus#person",
  "id": "118051310819094153327",
  "displayName": "Chirag Shah",
  "url": "https://plus.google.com/118051310819094153327",
  "image": {
    "url": "https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-XnZDEoiF09Y/AAAAAAAAAAI/AAAAAAAAYCI/7fow4a2UTMU/photo.jpg"
  }
}

Common Properties

While each type of resource will have its own unique representation, there are a number of common properties that are found in almost all resource representations.

Property Name

Value

Description

displayName

string

This is the name of the resource, suitable for displaying to a user.

id

string

This property uniquely identifies a resource. Every resource of a given kind will have a unique id. Even though an id may sometimes look like a number, it should always be treated as a string.

kind

string

This identifies what kind of resource a JSON object represents. This is particularly useful when programmatically determining how to parse an unknown object.

url

string

This is the primary URL, or permalink, for the resource.

Pagination

In requests that can respond with potentially large collections, such as Activities list, each response contains a limited number of items, set by maxResults(default: 20). Each response also contains a nextPageToken property. To obtain the next page of items, you pass this value of nextPageToken to the pageTokenproperty of the next request. Repeat this process to page through the full collection.

For example, calling Activities list returns a response with nextPageToken:

{
  "kind": "plus#activityFeed",
  "title": "Plus Public Activities Feed",
  "nextPageToken": "CKaEL",
  "items": [
    {
      "kind": "plus#activity",
      "id": "123456789",
      ...
    },
    ...
  ]
  ...
}

To get the next page of activities, pass the value of this token in with your next Activities list request:

https://www.googleapis.com/plus/v1/people/me/activities/public?pageToken=CKaEL

As before, the response to this request includes nextPageToken, which you can pass in to get the next page of results. You can continue this cycle to get new pages — for the last page, “nextPageToken” will be absent.

 

it would be interesting the first wave of analysis on this new social network and see if it is any different from others, if at all.
After all, an API is only as good as the analysis and applications  that can be done on the data it provides

 

Interview Dan Steinberg Founder Salford Systems

Here is an interview with Dan Steinberg, Founder and President of Salford Systems (http://www.salford-systems.com/ )

Ajay- Describe your journey from academia to technology entrepreneurship. What are the key milestones or turning points that you remember.

 Dan- When I was in graduate school studying econometrics at Harvard,  a number of distinguished professors at Harvard (and MIT) were actively involved in substantial real world activities.  Professors that I interacted with, or studied with, or whose software I used became involved in the creation of such companies as Sun Microsystems, Data Resources, Inc. or were heavily involved in business consulting through their own companies or other influential consultants.  Some not involved in private sector consulting took on substantial roles in government such as membership on the President’s Council of Economic Advisors. The atmosphere was one that encouraged free movement between academia and the private sector so the idea of forming a consulting and software company was quite natural and did not seem in any way inconsistent with being devoted to the advancement of science.

 Ajay- What are the latest products by Salford Systems? Any future product plans or modification to work on Big Data analytics, mobile computing and cloud computing.

 Dan- Our central set of data mining technologies are CART, MARS, TreeNet, RandomForests, and PRIM, and we have always maintained feature rich logistic regression and linear regression modules. In our latest release scheduled for January 2012 we will be including a new data mining approach to linear and logistic regression allowing for the rapid processing of massive numbers of predictors (e.g., one million columns), with powerful predictor selection and coefficient shrinkage. The new methods allow not only classic techniques such as ridge and lasso regression, but also sub-lasso model sizes. Clear tradeoff diagrams between model complexity (number of predictors) and predictive accuracy allow the modeler to select an ideal balance suitable for their requirements.

The new version of our data mining suite, Salford Predictive Modeler (SPM), also includes two important extensions to the boosted tree technology at the heart of TreeNet.  The first, Importance Sampled learning Ensembles (ISLE), is used for the compression of TreeNet tree ensembles. Starting with, say, a 1,000 tree ensemble, the ISLE compression might well reduce this down to 200 reweighted trees. Such compression will be valuable when models need to be executed in real time. The compression rate is always under the modeler’s control, meaning that if a deployed model may only contain, say, 30 trees, then the compression will deliver an optimal 30-tree weighted ensemble. Needless to say, compression of tree ensembles should be expected to be lossy and how much accuracy is lost when extreme compression is desired will vary from case to case. Prior to ISLE, practitioners have simply truncated the ensemble to the maximum allowable size.  The new methodology will substantially outperform truncation.

The second major advance is RULEFIT, a rule extraction engine that starts with a TreeNet model and decomposes it into the most interesting and predictive rules. RULEFIT is also a tree ensemble post-processor and offers the possibility of improving on the original TreeNet predictive performance. One can think of the rule extraction as an alternative way to explain and interpret an otherwise complex multi-tree model. The rules extracted are similar conceptually to the terminal nodes of a CART tree but the various rules will not refer to mutually exclusive regions of the data.

 Ajay- You have led teams that have won multiple data mining competitions. What are some of your favorite techniques or approaches to a data mining problem.

 Dan- We only enter competitions involving problems for which our technology is suitable, generally, classification and regression. In these areas, we are  partial to TreeNet because it is such a capable and robust learning machine. However, we always find great value in analyzing many aspects of a data set with CART, especially when we require a compact and easy to understand story about the data. CART is exceptionally well suited to the discovery of errors in data, often revealing errors created by the competition organizers themselves. More than once, our reports of data problems have been responsible for the competition organizer’s decision to issue a corrected version of the data and we have been the only group to discover the problem.

In general, tackling a data mining competition is no different than tackling any analytical challenge. You must start with a solid conceptual grasp of the problem and the actual objectives, and the nature and limitations of the data. Following that comes feature extraction, the selection of a modeling strategy (or strategies), and then extensive experimentation to learn what works best.

 Ajay- I know you have created your own software. But are there other software that you use or liked to use?

 Dan- For analytics we frequently test open source software to make sure that our tools will in fact deliver the superior performance we advertise. In general, if a problem clearly requires technology other than that offered by Salford, we advise clients to seek other consultants expert in that other technology.

 Ajay- Your software is installed at 3500 sites including 400 universities as per http://www.salford-systems.com/company/aboutus/index.html What is the key to managing and keeping so many customers happy?

 Dan- First, we have taken great pains to make our software reliable and we make every effort  to avoid problems related to bugs.  Our testing procedures are extensive and we have experts dedicated to stress-testing software . Second, our interface is designed to be natural, intuitive, and easy to use, so the challenges to the new user are minimized. Also, clear documentation, help files, and training videos round out how we allow the user to look after themselves. Should a client need to contact us we try to achieve 24-hour turn around on tech support issues and monitor all tech support activity to ensure timeliness, accuracy, and helpfulness of our responses. WebEx/GotoMeeting and other internet based contact permit real time interaction.

 Ajay- What do you do to relax and unwind?

 Dan- I am in the gym almost every day combining weight and cardio training. No matter how tired I am before the workout I always come out energized so locating a good gym during my extensive travels is a must. I am also actively learning Portuguese so I look to watch a Brazilian TV show or Portuguese dubbed movie when I have time; I almost never watch any form of video unless it is available in Portuguese.

 Biography-

http://www.salford-systems.com/blog/dan-steinberg.html

Dan Steinberg, President and Founder of Salford Systems, is a well-respected member of the statistics and econometrics communities. In 1992, he developed the first PC-based implementation of the original CART procedure, working in concert with Leo Breiman, Richard Olshen, Charles Stone and Jerome Friedman. In addition, he has provided consulting services on a number of biomedical and market research projects, which have sparked further innovations in the CART program and methodology.

Dr. Steinberg received his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University, and has given full day presentations on data mining for the American Marketing Association, the Direct Marketing Association and the American Statistical Association. After earning a PhD in Econometrics at Harvard Steinberg began his professional career as a Member of the Technical Staff at Bell Labs, Murray Hill, and then as Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego. A book he co-authored on Classification and Regression Trees was awarded the 1999 Nikkei Quality Control Literature Prize in Japan for excellence in statistical literature promoting the improvement of industrial quality control and management.

His consulting experience at Salford Systems has included complex modeling projects for major banks worldwide, including Citibank, Chase, American Express, Credit Suisse, and has included projects in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Korea, Japan and Brazil. Steinberg led the teams that won first place awards in the KDDCup 2000, and the 2002 Duke/TeraData Churn modeling competition, and the teams that won awards in the PAKDD competitions of 2006 and 2007. He has published papers in economics, econometrics, computer science journals, and contributes actively to the ongoing research and development at Salford.

Interview Eberhard Miethke and Dr. Mamdouh Refaat, Angoss Software

Here is an interview with Eberhard Miethke and Dr. Mamdouh Refaat, of Angoss Software. Angoss is a global leader in delivering business intelligence software and predictive analytics solutions that help businesses capitalize on their data by uncovering new opportunities to increase sales and profitability and to reduce risk.

Ajay-  Describe your personal journey in software. How can we guide young students to pursue more useful software development than just gaming applications.

 Mamdouh- I started using computers long time ago when they were programmed using punched cards! First in Fortran, then C, later C++, and then the rest. Computers and software were viewed as technical/engineering tools, and that’s why we can still see the heavy technical orientation of command languages such as Unix shells and even in the windows Command shell. However, with the introduction of database systems and Microsoft office apps, it was clear that business will be the primary user and field of application for software. My personal trip in software started with scientific applications, then business and database systems, and finally statistical software – which you can think of it as returning to the more scientific orientation. However, with the wide acceptance of businesses of the application of statistical methods in different fields such as marketing and risk management, it is a fast growing field that in need of a lot of innovation.

Ajay – Angoss makes multiple data mining and analytics products. could you please introduce us to your product portfolio and what specific data analytics need they serve.

a- Attached please find our main product flyers for KnowledgeSTUDIO and KnowledgeSEEKER. We have a 3rd product called “strategy builder” which is an add-on to the decision tree modules. This is also described in the flyer.

(see- Angoss Knowledge Studio Product Guide April2011  and http://www.scribd.com/doc/63176430/Angoss-Knowledge-Seeker-Product-Guide-April2011  )

Ajay-  The trend in analytics is for big data and cloud computing- with hadoop enabling processing of massive data sets on scalable infrastructure. What are your plans for cloud computing, tablet based as well as mobile based computing.

a- This is an area where the plan is still being figured out in all organizations. The current explosion of data collected from mobile phones, text messages, and social websites will need radically new applications that can utilize the data from these sources. Current applications are based on the relational database paradigm designed in the 70’s through the 90’s of the 20th century.

But data sources are generating data in volumes and formats that are challenging this paradigm and will need a set of new tools and possibly programming languages to fit these needs. The cloud computing, tablet based and mobile computing (which are the same thing in my opinion, just different sizes of the device) are also two technologies that have not been explored in analytics yet.

The approach taken so far by most companies, including Angoss, is to rely on new xml-based standards to represent data structures for the particular models. In this case, it is the PMML (predictive modelling mark-up language) standard, in order to allow the interoperability between analytics applications. Standardizing on the representation of models is viewed as the first step in order to allow the implementation of these models to emerging platforms, being that the cloud or mobile, or social networking websites.

The second challenge cited above is the rapidly increasing size of the data to be analyzed. Angoss has already identified this challenge early on and is currently offering in-database analytics drivers for several database engines: Netezza, Teradata and SQL Server.

These drivers allow our analytics products to translate their routines into efficient SQL-based scripts that run in the database engine to exploit its performance as well as the powerful hardware on which it runs. Thus, instead of copying the data to a staging format for analytics, these drivers allow the data to be analyzed “in-place” within the database without moving it.

Thus offering performance, security and integrity. The performance is improved because of the use of the well tuned database engines running on powerful hardware.

Extra security is achieved by not copying the data to other platforms, which could be less secure. And finally, the integrity of the results are vastly improved by making sure that the results are always obtained by analyzing the up-to-date data residing in the database rather than an older copy of the data which could be obsolete by the time the analysis is concluded.

Ajay- What are the principal competing products to your offerings, and what makes your products special or differentiated in value to them (for each customer segment).

a- There are two major players in today’s market that we usually encounter as competitors, they are: SAS and IBM.

SAS offers a data mining workbench in the form of SAS Enterprise Miner, which is closely tied to SAS data mining methodology known as SEMMA.

On the other hand, IBM has recently acquired SPSS, which offered its Clementine data mining software. IBM has now rebranded Clementine as IBM SPSS Modeller.

In comparison to these products, our KnowledgeSTUDIO and KnowledgeSEEKER offer three main advantages: ease of use; affordability; and ease of integration into existing BI environments.

Angoss products were designed to look-and-feel-like popular Microsoft office applications. This makes the learning curve indeed very steep. Typically, an intermediate level analyst needs only 2-3 days of training to become proficient in the use of the software with all its advanced features.

Another important feature of Angoss software products is their integration with SAS/base product, and SQL-based database engines. All predictive models generated by Angoss can be automatically translated to SAS and SQL scripts. This allows the generation of scoring code for these common platforms. While the software interface simplifies all the tasks to allow business users to take advantage of the value added by predictive models, the software includes advanced options to allow experienced statisticians to fine-tune their models by adjusting all model parameters as needed.

In addition, Angoss offers a unique product called StrategyBuilder, which allows the analyst to add key performance indicators (KPI’s) to predictive models. KPI’s such as profitability, market share, and loyalty are usually required to be calculated in conjunction with any sales and marketing campaign. Therefore, StrategyBuilder was designed to integrate such KPI’s with the results of a predictive model in order to render the appropriate treatment for each customer segment. These results are all integrated into a deployment strategy that can also be translated into an execution code in SQL or SAS.

The above competitive features offered by the software products of Angoss is behind its success in serving over 4000 users from over 500 clients worldwide.

Ajay -Describe a major case study where using Angoss software helped save a big amount of revenue/costs by innovative data mining.

a-Rogers Telecommunications Inc. is one of the largest Canadian telecommunications providers, serving over 8.5 million customers and a revenue of 11.1 Billion Canadian Dollars (2009). In 2008, Rogers engaged Angoss in order to help with the problem of ballooning accounts receivable for a period of 18 months.

The problem was approached by improving the efficiency of the call centre serving the collections process by a set of predictive models. The first set of models were designed to find accounts likely to default ahead of time in order to take preventative measures. A second set of models were designed to optimize the call centre resources to focus on delinquent accounts likely to pay back most of the outstanding balance. Accounts that were identified as not likely to pack quickly were good candidates for “Early-out” treatment, by forwarding them directly to collection agencies. Angoss hosted Rogers’ data and provided on a regular interval the lists of accounts for each treatment to be deployed by the call centre dialler. As a result of this Rogers estimated an improvement of 10% of the collected sums.

Biography-

Mamdouh has been active in consulting, research, and training in various areas of information technology and software development for the last 20 years. He has worked on numerous projects with major organizations in North America and Europe in the areas of data mining, business analytics, business analysis, and engineering analysis. He has held several consulting positions for solution providers including Predict AG in Basel, Switzerland, and as ANGOSS Corp. Mamdouh is the Director of Professional services for EMEA region of ANGOSS Software. Mamdouh received his PhD in engineering from the University of Toronto and his MBA from the University of Leeds, UK.

Mamdouh is the author of:

"Credit Risk Scorecards: Development and Implmentation using SAS"
 "Data Preparation for Data Mining Using SAS",
 (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems) (Paperback)
 and co-author of
 "Data Mining: Know it all",Morgan Kaufmann



Eberhard Miethke  works as a senior sales executive for Angoss

 

About Angoss-

Angoss is a global leader in delivering business intelligence software and predictive analytics to businesses looking to improve performance across sales, marketing and risk. With a suite of desktop, client-server and in-database software products and Software-as-a-Service solutions, Angoss delivers powerful approaches to turn information into actionable business decisions and competitive advantage.

Angoss software products and solutions are user-friendly and agile, making predictive analytics accessible and easy to use.

Using Two Operating Systems for RATTLE, #Rstats Data Mining GUI

Using a virtual partition is slightly better than using a dual boot system. That is because you can keep the specialized operating system (usually Linux) within the main operating system (usually Windows), browse and alternate between the two operating system just using a simple command, and can utilize the advantages of both operating system.

Also you can create project specific discs for enhanced security.

In my (limited ) Mac experience, the comparisons of each operating system are-

1) Mac-  Both robust and aesthetically designed OS, the higher price and hardware-lockin for Mac remains a disadvantage. Also many stats and analytical software just wont work on the Mac

2) Windows- It is cheaper than Mac and easier to use than Linux. Also has the most compatibility with applications (usually when not crashing)

3) Linux- The lightest and most customized software in the OS class, free to use, and has many lite versions for newbies. Not compatible with mainstream corporate IT infrastructure as of 2011.

I personally use VMWare Player for creating the virtual disk (as much more convenient than the wubi.exe method)  from http://www.vmware.com/support/product-support/player/  (and downloadable from http://downloads.vmware.com/d/info/desktop_downloads/vmware_player/3_0)

That enables me to use Ubuntu on the alternative OS- keeping my Windows 7 for some Windows specific applications . For software like Rattle, the R data mining GUI , it helps to use two operating systems, in view of difficulties in GTK+.

Installing Rattle on Windows 7 is a major pain thanks to backward compatibility issues and version issues of GTK, but it installs on Ubuntu like a breeze- and it is very very convenient to switch between the two operating systems

Download Rattle from http://rattle.togaware.com/ and test it on the dual OS arrangement to see yourself.