Tag: kxen

Decisionstats Interviews

Here is a list of interviews that I have published- these are specific to analytics and data mining and include only the most recent interviews. If I have missed out any notable recent interview related to analytics and data mining, kindly do let me know. Hat Tip to Karl Rexer, for this suggestion .

Date    Name of Interviewee    Designation and Organization

09-Jun    Karl Rexer                          President, Rexer Analytics
05-Jun    Jim Daves                          CMO, SAS Institute
04-Jun    Paul van Eikeren                 President and CEO, Blue Reference
29-May    David Smith                      Director of Community, REvolution Computing
17-May    Dominic Pouzin                 CEO, Data Applied
11-May    Bruno Delahaye                 VP, KXEN
04-May    Ron Ramos                        Director, Zementis
30-Apr    Oliver Jouve                       VP, SPSS Inc
21-Apr    Fabian Dill                         Co- Founder, Knime.com
18-Apr    Alicia Mcgreevey                 Head Marketing, Visual Numerics
27-Mar    Francoise Soulie Fogelman    VP, KXEN
17-Mar    Jon Peck                            Principal Software Engineer, SPSS Inc
06-Mar    Anne Milley                        Director of product marketing, SAS Institute
04-Mar    Anne Milley                        Director of product marketing, SAS Institute
03-Feb    Phil Rack                            Creator, Bridge to R,and CEO Minequest
03-Feb    Michael Zeller                     CEO, Zementis
31-Jan    Richard Schultz                   CEO, Revolution Computing
21-Jan    Bob Muenchen                    Author, R for SAS and SPSS Users
13-Jan    Dr Graham Williams           Creator, Rattle GUI for R
05-Jan    Roger Haddad                    CEO, KXEN
26-Sep    June Dershewitz                  VP, Semphonic
04-Sep    Vincent Granville                 Head, Analyticbridge

The URl’s to specific interviews are also in this sheet.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=rWTqcMe9mqwHeFv1e4GS_yg&single=true&gid=0&range=a1%3Ae24&output=html

Conferences: KXEN and KDD 09

Here is an announcement regarding one of the foremost conferences on Knowledge Discovery KDD 2009 which is being held in Paris. We have interviewed the joint general chair of the conference, KXEN’s Francoise Soulie Fogelman here at http://www.decisionstats.com/2009/03/27/interview-franoise-soulie-fogelman-kxen/

Indeed given KXEN’s exciting release of their social network analysis software, KSN they are also gold sponsors for the conference. You should view the archives here http://www.kdd2008.com/ or read more here http://www.kdd.org/kdd2009/index.html

From KXEN’s Press Release-

World’s Best Data Mining Knowledge and Expertise on Show
in Paris at KDD-09

Eminent data mining researchers, academics and practitioners from across the world are honing their presentation skills and charging their laptops in readiness for the industry’s largest and most respected conference, this year being staged for the first time in Europe, in the city of Paris.

The knowledge discovery and data mining 2009 (KDD-09) event will bring together more than 600 specialists, representing the single largest body of expertise in the science and application of data mining technology for industry, government and academia. They will discuss recent discoveries in data mining and share innovative ways of applying the technology in real world business.

Running from the 28th June to 1st July, KDD-09 will feature more than 120 presentations by experts from the US, Europe, Scandinavia and Asia-Pacific. A 20% increase in papers submitted reflects the growing importance of data mining in financially constrained markets. Companies taking part include Orange as a platinum sponsor and Microsoft adCenterLabs and KXEN as gold sponsors. Silver sponsors are Bayesia, Google, HP labs, Pervasive, SAS, Vadis and Yahoo!. Other sponsors include Alberta Center for Machine Learning, Pascal2, Socio Logiciels, Statsoft, Zementis, SFDS, IBM and SIGMOD.

Joint general chair of KDD-09, Francoise Soulie Fogelman, VP Business Development KXEN, says the conference offers a unique chance to see the very latest thinking in data mining. “Some of the best minds from the scientific and business communities will be there, ready and willing to share the results of their cutting edge research and data mining projects with end users. No other industry event offers anything like the depth and breadth of expertise on offer here.”

A particular focus for 2009 will be social network analysis: the discovery and use for competitive advantage of the links between people in social and professional networks. Currently a hot topic among data mining professionals – especially those working in the telecommunications sector – this technique will feature in theoretical and workshop presentations. Details will also be revealed of the world’s first practical applications involving industrial scale volumes of data. Gold sponsor KXEN will present on its booth its recently revealed KSN social network module, helping companies extract valuable new intelligence for better customer acquisition, retention, cross-sell and up-sell campaigns.

Other exhibitors include sponsors as well as Cambridge University Press, Cap Digital, Elsevier, Morgan Claypool Publishers, Oracle, Salford Systems, Springer and Taylor & Francis CRC press.

Also high on the agenda are real-time Web applications for data mining for custom advertising and personalized offers, both seen as crucial to online marketing and sales but both also requiring technologies able to handle very large volumes of data in real time.

Away from science and technology, delegates will also have a chance to sample the best of Paris architecture and hospitality on the evening of 29th June in the main reception room at the exclusive Hotel de Ville – a venue normally reserved for visiting heads of state. A cocktail reception hosted by KXEN will follow presentations, including a welcome from Jean-Louis Missika, the Deputy Mayor of Paris in charge of Innovation, Research and Universities.

There will also be the presentation of awards of the KDD cup by Dr. Isabelle Guyon (ClopiNet). The cup is awarded to the winners of a contest around predicting customer scores from large marketing databases. It, and other prize awards, are being sponsored by the French telecommunications company Orange and Google.

KDD-09 is organized by the data mining special interest group of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society. The ACM provides resources that advance computing both as a science and a profession. ACM provides the computing field’s premier digital library and serves its members and the computing profession with leading-edge publications, conferences, and career resources.

More details, program & registration: http://www.kdd.org/kdd2009/index.html

About KXEN

KXEN, The Data Mining Automation Companyâ„¢ delivers next-generation Customer Lifecycle Analytics to enterprises that depend on analytics as a competitive advantage. KXEN’s Data Mining Automation Solution drives significant improvements in customer acquisition, retention, cross-sell and risk applications. Its solution integrates predictive analytics into strategic business processes, allowing customers to drive greater value into their business. Find out more by visiting www.kxen.com.

dcvss358_470gv3wjffk_b

Disclaimer- I am a social media consultant to KXEN.

KXEN Case Studies : Financial Sector

Here are the summaries of some excellent success stories that KXEN has achieved working with partners in the financial world over the years.

Fraud Modeling- Disbank (acquired by Fortis) Turkey

1. Dısbank increased the number of identified fraudulent applications by 200% from 7 to 21 per day.

2.More than 50 fraudsters using counterfeit cards at merchant locations or fraudulent applications have been arrested after April 2004 when the fraud modeling system was set.


A large Bank on the U.S. East Coast

1.Response Modeling

Previously it took the modeling group four weeks to build one model with several hundred variables, using traditional modeling tools. KXEN took one hour for the same problem and doubled the lift in the top decile because it included variables that had not been used for this business question before.

2.Data Quality

Building a Cross/Up-sell Model for a direct marketing campaign to high net worth customers, the modelers needed four weeks using 1500 variables. Again it took one hour with KXEN, which uncovered significant problems with some of the top predictive variables. Further investigation proved that these problems were created in the data merge of the mail file and response file, creating several “perfect” predictors. The model was re-run, removing these variables, and immediately put into production.

Le Crédit Lyonnais

1.Around 160 score models now built annually – compared to around 10 previously – for 130 direct marketing campaigns.
2.KXEN software has allowed LCL to drive up response rates, leading to more value-added services for customers.

Finansbank, Turkey

1.Within 4 months of starting the project to combat dormancy using KXEN’s solution, the bank had successfully reactivated half its previously dormant customers as per Kunter Kutluay, Finansbank Director of Marketing and Risk Analytics.

Bank Austria Creditanstalt , Austria

1.Some 4.5 terabytes of data are held in the bank’s operational systems, with a further 2 terabytes archived. Analytical models created in KXEN are automatically fed through the bank’s scoring engine in batches weekly
or monthly depending on the schema.

“But we are looking at a success rate of target customer deals in the area of three to five per cent with KXEN.
Before that, it was one per cent or less. ”
Werner Widhalm, Head of the Customer Knowledge Management Unit.

Barclays

1.Barclays’ Teradata warehouse holds information on some 14 million active customers, with data
on many different aspects of customer behaviour. Previously, analysts had to manually whittle down several thousand fields of data to a core of only a few hundred to fit the limitations of the modelling process. Now, all of the variables can be fed straight into the predictive model.

Summary– KXEN has achieved tremendous response in all aspects of data modelling in financial sector where time in building, deploying and analyzing model is much more crucial than many other sectors. I would be following this with other case studies on other KXEN successes across multiple domains.

Source – http://www.kxen.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=220&Itemid=786

Disclaimer- I am a social media consultant for KXEN.

KXEN Webinar on Automation

Here is a webinare from KXEN on automation- having seen the product in action multiple times it is always a Wow moment when you see KXEN build a model in 5 minutes flat from thousands of variables and tens of thousands of rows. If you have not seen the latest version of KXEN in action – do take time out for 60 minutes to see this

From http://www.kxen.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=546&Itemid=985

KXEN’s Automation Revolutionizes Modeling Productivity

  • Date: June 9, 2009
  • Time: 9:00 am Pacific/12:00 noon Eastern
  • Duration: 60 minutes

Register Now!

You have already recognized improved marketing performance by investing in a campaign management solution and data mining tools. Why might you be interested in KXEN, the leader in data mining automation?

If you are like many businesses these days, you would like to be able to do more with less. You have a limited analytical team and more modeling requirements than ever.

With KXEN, our customers are able to produce models in 1/10th to 1/100th of the time of traditional data mining tools, while not sacrificing model accuracy or robustness.

What makes KXEN different? In this webinar, you will learn how and why KXEN is unique. And why your business might want to select KXEN as your data mining solution.

What will be demonstrated

This presentation will show you how KXEN automates the data mining process including:

Data Preparation
Variable Selection
Model Building
Model Validation
Scoring Code Generation

Who should attend

Statisticians, data miners, data analysts, business analysts and marketing executives who want to increase the productivity of their analytics team.

Register Now!

Disclaimer- I am a consultant to KXEN on social media

Building KXEN Models on Ubuntu

Doing analytics on Linux sometimes seems user unfriendly but the reality is itis not so- and it is actually cheaper for you as you can focus on the analytical software rather than the Operating System licensing costs.

virtualization-kvm-ubuntu
kxen2

virtualization-kvm-ubuntu

Note: The software used in this were KXEN Linux version 2.4 and Ubuntu Hardy Heron.

Using KXEN on an Ubuntu Linux proved surprisingly even more easy. Thanks to some excellent help provided by the KXEN support team and some discussions with KXEN’s head of Research,Bertrand the following 5 step procedure should help you start building models in KXEN right away.

Using Ubuntu has the added advantages of security, low costs as well as all the ease of a Graphical User Interface-

1)Backward Compatibility

$ sudo apt-get install libstdc++5

(it will then ask the password).

2)Installing Java

$ sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre

3) Download and Unzipping the Software
Download the zipped folder from the KXEN Download Site.
Unzip  the Linux Version of KXEN system from the Download Site- This creates the master folder (example Kxen_X86-Linux-2.4.21-4.Elsmp_v5_0_3 )

4)Licensing
Run the KXEN Node Generator in KxNodeCodeGenerator folder within the master folder above.
The new file KXEN Node.txt is then sent back to support team and they send the License_nl.cfg

5)Installation ( for stand alone client)

Install a JVM 1.4.2 and export the java/bin directory in the $PATH environment variable.

The exe is located in the folder KJWizardJNI- The following commands

$ cd KJWizardJNI
$ PATH=/opt/j2sdk1.4.2_10/bin:$PATH ; export PATH
$ ./KJWizardJNI.sh

Run KXEN Models Happily ever after !!!

Note KXEN offers the ability to export models in a variety of formats including PMML, SAS, SQL and other languages

Disclaimer- I am a consultant on social media to KXEN

Interview KXEN Bruno Delahaye

In my continuing coverage of KXEN, the plucky company that has managed to revolutionize analytics automation and social network analysis- Here is an interview with KXEN’s Vice President Bruno Delahaye.

246ee7c

Ajay – What is the best feature you like in KXEN. – both   as a company and as a product.

Bruno- Well actually what I like the most about KXEN is the will to make a difference. This is true at different levels of course: each individual within the company is trying to make things happen. For employees at KXEN this is not just a job: they want to change the game! The product side is naturally cascading from this. We are not simply recoding existing algorithms like some of our competitors are doing, instead we are looking in every domain of predictive and descriptive analytics where we can deliver higher value to our customers. When customers, thanks to the automation we provide, come back to us stating that they manage to increase their modeling productivity by 10 or even 50 compared to their previous modeling process we really think that what we provide is changing the game. Also, the fact that we have well over 500 customers globally today is proving that our customers recognize this as well!

Ajay : What areas has KXEN been most suitable for ? Biggest success story so far.
Bruno- KXEN has been very successful for 2 types of customers. We have been very successful in companies with mature Data Mining practices, companies that have realized that they need to move from a fully hand crafted approach to a more industrialized one in order to answer business requirements. As an example, lots of large companies run 10s of marketing campaigns per month and actually use data mining for only 1 or 2 at best… once organizations have understood the power of Data Mining they certainly want to target each campaign. Only KXEN can provide the level of automation required for this. On the other side, new data mining users (either new companies or new departments in a company) are also very eager to use KXEN. The learning curve with KXEN is so quick that it enables them to use their existing team (the ones that are aware of the business issues) and make them run within few days successful churn management programs or rebuild their customer segmentation in a reliable manner.

If you were expecting figures here, some Vodafone entities are claiming that they reduce churn in some customer segments by more than 10% by implementing KXEN. Unicredit in Austria mentioned that due to KXEN they gained an additional 50m€ per season….as you can guess the success of our customers always brighten our days.

Ajay : What areas would you rather not recommend KXEN? What other software would you recommend in those cases ?

Bruno- Well, I would recommend to use KXEN in every area of course, nevertheless where we have been less successful so far is with companies where time pressure to deliver analysis is lower. Basically, research departments tend to use more softwares like SAS EM or SPSS Clementine that are more methods/algorithms oriented rather than results oriented.

Ajay : What is the biggest challenge you have faced while introducing KXEN to a wider audience.
Bruno- The bigger challenge we have is in building domain expertise, it is indeed very difficult to build knowledge of our teams at the same time in Customer Lifecycle Analytics, in HRM, SCM… that is where building a confident relationship with the customer is so important. We have to prove to our prospect very early in the discussions that with KXEN they will make significant steps forward! This is also where our partner are so important to us. KXEN works with international as well as local partners with specific expertise to help our customers make the best possible use of the KXEN Data mining software to insure a high and fast ROI.

Ajay -Do you think the text mining as well as the Data Fusion approach can work for online web analytics, search engines or ad targeting?

Bruno- The data fusion approach is certainly one that makes sense for online web analytics. Analyzing the sequence of events rather than just taking into account whether an event occurs is actually a very powerful way to predict customer behavior or in this case the next click or the next action that is going to be made. I am not in this case claiming that everything has to be real-time as this could be the cause of the creation of weak or even unreliable/non stable models. Instead what we recommend our customer to do is to split the learning part that can be made off-line from the deployment that needs to be done real-time.

Ajay- Describe the relationships of KXEN with other members of the business intelligence community in terms of alliances.

Bruno- KXEN is a very good complement to BI vendors. We are actually partnering with several Data warehouse Vendors. For Data warehouse, the equation is quite simple they allow customers to structure and store the data but to provide real ROI, solutions need to be plugged on top of them. Setting a Data warehouse if you do not use the stored data is just another cost, what KXEN does is enabling to take advantage of the data asset to build customer segments that you will use to define your marketing mix, or simply target your customer either for cross-selling, up-selling or retention/loyalty purposes. The same is valid for credit scoring, fraud detection….

Case Study- Assume I have 50000 leads daily on a Car buying website. How would KXEN help me in scoring the model (as compared to other online based scoring solutions). Is it technically possible for me to install KXEN on Windows/ Other instances in remote computing like Amazon EC2 and not a server sitting somewhere.

The key difference, I believe, is that with KXEN you will indeed be able to do this even if you are not a data mining expert, if you want to use the results of yesterday’s campaigns to rebuild a model and if you can only afford to spend 10 minutes on this task every day. At the end of the day what we allow our users is to answer their business questions within the time frame they have rather than trying to convince them that they do not really need to do so many analysis for their business to run successfully

Ajay- And that was Bruno, VP, EMEA, KXEN. His profile can be seen here

http://www.linkedin.com/in/brunodelahaye

Bruno Delahaye manages KXEN’s operations for Continental Europe, Middle East, Africa and South America at KXEN. He is responsible for identifying and managing key partnership opportunities and developing the overall strategy for new partnerships.

For more on KXEN please go to http://www.kxen.com, you may need to regsiter to download their properietary white papers on Structural Risk Management or Text Mining.

Conflict of Interest Disclaimer-I am a consultant to KXEN as a social media consultant. Chairman Roger Hadaad was one of the first Chairman of a major corporation to agree to give interview to this small blog.

KXEN as in Customer Survey

KXEN is sharing its survey results transparently unlike other survey results that hide their methodology behind language of English rather than language of Maths. Well KXEN doesn’t and they shared the raw data.

Here are some of them-

Answer Options Strongly disagree + disagree Strongly agree + agree
KXEN Solutions are easy to install, configure and administrate. 6.12% 93.88%
KXEN Solutions are easy to use. 0.00% 100.00%
KXEN Graphical User Interface (GUI) is user-friendly. 10.00% 90.00%
KXEN on-line helps & documentation are comprehensive, explicit, clear and well-illustrated. 31.91% 68.09%
KXEN provides you with all functionalities you expected. 17.24% 82.76%
KXEN delivers high quality results and outputs. 5.17% 94.83%
Projects involving KXEN are fast implemented. 5.17% 94.83%
KXEN connexions to data sources are reliable and effective. 4.00% 96.00%
Service(s) received was(were) performed by attentive and professional KXEN people. 0.00% 100.00%
KXEN is the main datamining solution you are using. 20.75% 79.25%
KXEN is the main datamining solution in your company. 36.96% 63.04%
KXEN embraces a great datamining methodology. 3.85% 96.15%
KXEN is really helpful in your day to day operations. 6.00% 94.00%
KXEN helped you improve your overall business. 2.04% 97.96%
KXEN speeded up your modeling activities. 1.89% 98.11%
KXEN helped increase the value of Predictive Analytics in your company. 4.35% 95.65%
KXEN is strategic for your activity. 10.00% 90.00%
KXEN is strategic for your company. 20.00% 80.00%
You are told about KXEN updates and latest news. 13.04% 86.96%
You would recommend KXEN to a colleague. 0.00% 100.00%
You would recommend KXEN to a friend. 2.04% 97.96%

 

 

and the summarization

image

and to conclude

image

Ajay- I had a look at the raw data and had discussions with Rexer analytics ( an interview coming up) on how they do their independent surveys. The above results seem specific, measurable and transparent from a customer point of view.

Visit www.kxen.com for better understanding.

Disclaimer- I am a consultant on social media to KXEN