Software Review- BigML.com – Machine Learning meets the Cloud

I had a chance to dekko the new startup BigML https://bigml.com/ and was suitably impressed by the briefing and my own puttering around the site. Here is my review-

1) The website is very intutively designed- You can create a dataset from an uploaded file in one click and you can create a Decision Tree model in one click as well. I wish other cloud computing websites like Google Prediction API make design so intutive and easy to understand. Also unlike Google Prediction API, the models are not black box models, but have a description which can be understood.

2) It includes some well known data sources for people trying it out. They were kind enough to offer 5 invite codes for readers of Decisionstats ( if you want to check it yourself, use the codes below the post, note they are one time only , so the first five get the invites.

BigML is still invite only but plan to get into open release soon.

3) Data Sources can only be by uploading files (csv) but they plan to change this hopefully to get data from buckets (s3? or Google?) and from URLs.

4) The one click operation to convert data source into a dataset shows a histogram (distribution) of individual variables.The back end is clojure , because the team explained it made the easiest sense and fit with Java. The good news (?) is you would never see the clojure code at the back end. You can read about it from http://clojure.org/

As cloud computing takes off (someday) I expect clojure popularity to take off as well.

Clojure is a dynamic programming language that targets the Java Virtual Machine (and the CLR, and JavaScript). It is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language – it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Every feature supported by Clojure is supported at runtime. Clojure provides easy access to the Java frameworks, with optional type hints and type inference, to ensure that calls to Java can avoid reflection.

Clojure is a dialect of Lisp

5) As of now decision trees is the only distributed algol, but they expect to roll out other machine learning stuff soon. Hopefully this includes regression (as logit and linear) and k means clustering. The trees are created and pruned in real time which gives a slightly animated (and impressive effect). and yes model building is an one click operation.

The real time -live pruning is really impressive and I wonder why /how it can ever be replicated in other software based on desktop, because of the sheer interactive nature.

Making the model is just half the work. Creating predictions and scoring the model is what is really the money-earner. It is one click and customization is quite intuitive. It is not quite PMML compliant yet so I hope some Zemanta like functionality can be added so huge amounts of models can be applied to predictions or score data in real time.

If you are a developer/data hacker, you should check out this section too- it is quite impressive that the designers of BigML have planned for API access so early.

https://bigml.com/developers

BigML.io gives you:

Secure programmatic access to all your BigML resources.

Fully white-box access to your datasets and models.

Asynchronous creation of datasets and models.

Near real-time predictions.

Note: For your convenience, some of the snippets below include your real username and API key.

Please keep them secret.

REST API

BigML.io conforms to the design principles of Representational State Transfer (REST). BigML.io is enterely HTTP-based.

BigML.io gives you access to four basic resources: Source, Dataset, Model and Prediction. You cancreate, read, update, and delete resources using the respective standard HTTP methods: POST, GET,PUT and DELETE.

All communication with BigML.io is JSON formatted except for source creation. Source creation is handled with a HTTP PUT using the “multipart/form-data” content-type

HTTPS

All access to BigML.io must be performed over HTTPS

and https://bigml.com/developers/quick_start ( In think an R package which uses JSON ,RCurl would further help in enhancing ease of usage).

Summary-

Overall a welcome addition to make software in the real of cloud computing and statistical computation/business analytics both easy to use and easy to deploy with fail safe mechanisms built in.

Check out https://bigml.com/ for yourself to see.

The invite codes are here -one time use only- first five get the invites- so click and try your luck, machine learning on the cloud.

If you dont get an invite (or it is already used, just leave your email there and wait a couple of days to get approval)

Easter Eggs in #Rstats

Yes.

Cite-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_egg_(media)

A virtual Easter egg is an intentional hidden message, in-joke, or feature in a work such as a computer program, web page, video game, movie, book, or crossword. The term was coined — according to Warren Robinett — by Atari after they were pointed to the secret message left by Robinett in the game Adventure.^[1] It draws a parallel with the custom of the Easter egg hunt observed in many Western nations as well as the last Russian imperial family’s tradition of giving elaborately jeweled egg-shaped creations by Carl Fabergé which contained hidden surprises

In R.

Cite-http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7910270/are-there-any-easter-eggs-in-base-r-or-in-major-packages

I like this

just type

example(readLine)

and these two

on 32 bit R type

memory.limit(4096)

and on any version try four question marks

Perhaps the prettiest eggs are the demos in animation package.

But there is magic in asking for help on internal functions in R

Just type-

?.Internal

and you get the sobering thought that you probably are a R Muggle

Call an Internal Function

Description

.Internal performs a call to an internal code which is built in to the R interpreter.

Only true R wizards should even consider using this function, and only R developers can add to the list of internal functions.

Usage

 .Internal(call)

Arguments

call a call expression

R for Predictive Modeling- PAW Toronto

A nice workshop on using R for Predictive Modeling by Max Kuhn Director, Nonclinical Statistics, Pfizer is on at PAW Toronto.

Workshop

Monday, April 23, 2012 in Toronto
Full-day: 9:00am – 4:30pm

R for Predictive Modeling:
A Hands-On Introduction

Intended Audience: Practitioners who wish to learn how to execute on predictive analytics by way of the R language; anyone who wants “to turn ideas into software, quickly and faithfully.”

Knowledge Level: Either hands-on experience with predictive modeling (without R) or hands-on familiarity with any programming language (other than R) is sufficient background and preparation to participate in this workshop.

What prior attendees have exclaimed

Workshop Description

This one-day session provides a hands-on introduction to R, the well-known open-source platform for data analysis. Real examples are employed in order to methodically expose attendees to best practices driving R and its rich set of predictive modeling packages, providing hands-on experience and know-how. R is compared to other data analysis platforms, and common pitfalls in using R are addressed.

The instructor, a leading R developer and the creator of CARET, a core R package that streamlines the process for creating predictive models, will guide attendees on hands-on execution with R, covering:

A working knowledge of the R system
The strengths and limitations of the R language
Preparing data with R, including splitting, resampling and variable creation
Developing predictive models with R, including decision trees, support vector machines and ensemble methods
Visualization: Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA), and tools that persuade
Evaluating predictive models, including viewing lift curves, variable importance and avoiding overfitting

Hardware: Bring Your Own Laptop
Each workshop participant is required to bring their own laptop running Windows or OS X. The software used during this training program, R, is free and readily available for download.

Attendees receive an electronic copy of the course materials and related R code at the conclusion of the workshop.

Schedule

Price and Registration Info:

Workshop starts at 9:00am
Morning Coffee Break at 10:30am – 11:00am
Lunch provided at 12:30 – 1:15pm
Afternoon Coffee Break at 2:30pm – 3:00pm
End of the Workshop: 4:30pm

Instructor

Max Kuhn, Director, Nonclinical Statistics, Pfizer

Max Kuhn is a Director of Nonclinical Statistics at Pfizer Global R&D in Connecticut. He has been applying models in the pharmaceutical industries for over 15 years.

He is a leading R developer and the author of several R packages including the CARET package that provides a simple and consistent interface to over 100 predictive models available in R.

Mr. Kuhn has taught courses on modeling within Pfizer and externally, including a class for the India Ministry of Information Technology.

Source-

http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/toronto/2012/r_for_predictive_modeling.php

Teradata updates Teradata-R

The Teradata add-on package for R

teradataR is a package or library that allows R users to easily connect to Teradata, establish data frames (R data formats) to Teradata and to call in-database analytic functions within Teradata. This allows R users to work within their R console environment while leveraging the in-database functions developed with Teradata Warehouse Miner. This package provides 44 different analytical functions and an additional 20 data connection and R infrastructure functions. In addition, we’ve added a function that will list the stored procedures within Teradata provide the capability to call functions from R.

20 Functions to enable R infrastructure to operate with Teradata
tdConnect – Connect to Teradata via ODBC
Td.data.frame – Establish data frame connections to a Teradata table
44 in-database analytical functions callable from R. Sample of the functions include:
Descriptive statistics: Overlap, histogram, frequency, statistics, matrix functions, and values analysis
Reorganization functions: join, merge and samples
Transformations: bincode, recode, rescale, sigmoid, zscore and null replacement
K-Means clustering and Score K-Means
Statistical tests: ks, dagostino.pearson, shapiro.wilk, bionomial, and wilcoxon
R language features nrow, ncol, min, max, summary, as.dataframe, and dim
Tool and R functions that allow users to create their own custom analytic functions that’s callable by R.
Teradata Warehouse Miner can capture any analytic stream including UDFs and create a stored procedure
- Analytic process to create new derived predictive variables can be captured as a stored procedure.
- Entire process to create or update an analytical data set can be captured as a stored procedure.
- R function can list all the stored procedures within Teradata.
- R function can call a stored procedure that runs in-database

TeradataR allows R users to leverage all the benefits of in-database processing with Teradata:

Eliminate data movement from Teradata to the R framework for key data intensive tasks.
Leverage the speed of Teradata database’s parallel processing to run analytics against big data.
Ability to operate within the R console environment.
Embed your frequently performed tasks to run in-database.
R and TeradataR are free downloads.

Source- http://developer.teradata.com/applications/articles/in-database-analytics-with-teradata-r

This package allows users of R to interact with a Teradata database. R is an open source language for statistical computing and graphics. R provides a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modeling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering) and graphical techniques, and is highly extensible. Users can use many statistical functions directly against the Teradata system without having to extract the data into memory.

Enhancements included with this new 1.0.1 release include:

teradataR User Guide
addition of Mac OS X Package
addition of Red Hat Linux Package (added 2/23/12)
summary has been enhanced to run faster
JDBC support added to allow Windows or Mac users to run the package with JDBC
td.data.frame enhanced to allow support for manipulation to add columns and expressions
td.data.frame enhanced to use Teradata 14.0 Fastpath Transform Functions (see Appendix B)
td.tapply function added to apply a select group of functions to columns of an array

From-http://downloads.teradata.com/download/applications/teradata-r

and

A new R package for Red Hat Linux has been added to the teradataR 1.0.1 release. This new package provides the same functionality as in the previously released Windows and Mac OS X packages, but is built for Red Hat Linux. This version was built and tested on Red Hat Linux 6.2 32-bit. (The R version for Red Hat Linux is 2.14.1)

Installing this package is the same as any normal R package; just extract it into your R library area, or use the install.packagescommand with the file path.

from- http://developer.teradata.com/tag/r

and

With plenty of prolific and enthusiastic developers, the number of packages for R is expected to grow tremendously. Statisticians and analysts using these packages will find innovative ways to use data to answer their research and business questions. And as organizations become more willing to rely on open-source software for mission-critical tasks, R is poised to become an essential tool for analyzing our complex world.

Source-http://www.teradatamagazine.com/v09n03/Connections/R-you-ready/

From the user guide-

http://downloads.teradata.com/download/applications/teradata-r

teradataR allows R users to easily connect to Teradata, establish td data frames (virtual R data frames) to
Teradata and to call in-database analytic functions within Teradata. This allows R users to work within their R
console environment while leveraging the in-database functions

A Function List
teradataR-package Allow access to Teradata via R
as.data.frame.td.data.frame Convert td data frame to a data frame
as.td.data.frame Coerce to a td data frame
dim.td.data.frame Dimensions of a td data frame
hist.td.data.frame Histograms
Is.td.data.frame Is an Object a Teradata Data Frame
Is.td.expression Is an Object a Teradata Expression
mean.td.data.frame Arithmetic Mean
median.td.data.frame Median Value
min.td.data.frame Minima
predict.kmeans Kmeans Model Prediction
print.td.data.frame Show contents of a td data frame
sum.td.data.frame Sum of column
summary.td.data.frame Summary of Teradata Data Frame
Td.bincode Create Table of Bincode Values
Td.binomial Binomial Test
Td.binomialsign Binomial Sign Test
Td.call.sp Locate and call stored procedure
Td.cor Correlation Matrix
Td.cov Covariance Matrix
Td.dagostino.pearson D’Agostino Pearson Test
Td.data.frame Teradata Data Frames
Td.f.oneway One way F Test
Td.factanal Factor Analysis
Td.freq Frequency Analysis
Td.hist Histograms
Td.join Join Tables in Teradata
Td.kmeans K-Means Clustering
Td.ks Kolmogorov Smirnov Test
Td.lilliefors Lilliefors Test
Td.merge Merge Rows of Teradata Tables
Td.mode Mode Value of Column
Td.mwnkw Mann-Whitney/Kruskal Wallis Test
Td.nullreplace Replace Null Values
Td.overlap Overlap
Td.quantiles Quantile Values
Td.rank Rank
Td.recode Recode
Td.rescale Rescale Values of Column
Td.sample Sample Rows
Td.shapiro.wilk Shapiro Wilk
Td.sigmoid Sigmoid Transformation
Td.smirnov Smirnov Test
Td.solve Solve a system of equations
Td.stats General Statistics
Td.t.paired T Test Paired
Td.t.unpaired T Test Unpaired
Td.t.unpairedi T Test – Unpaired Indicator
Td.values Values
Td.wilcoxon Wilcoxon Test
Td.zscore Zscore Transformation
tdClose Close connection
tdConnect Connect to Teradata database
tdMetadataDB Set metadata database
tdQuery Query Teradata Database
teradataR Allow access to Teradata via R
[.td.data.frame Extract Teradata Data Frame
[<-.td.data.frame Replace value of Teradata Data Frame

Teradata Analytics

A recent announcement showing Teradata partnering with KXEN and Revolution Analytics for Teradata Analytics.

http://www.teradata.com/News-Releases/2012/Teradata-Expands-Integrated-Analytics-Portfolio/

The Latest in Open Source Emerging Software Technologies
Teradata provides customers with two additional open source technologies – “R” technology from Revolution Analytics for analytics and GeoServer technology for spatial data offered by the OpenGeo organization – both of which are able to leverage the power of Teradata in-database processing for faster, smarter answers to business questions.

In addition to the existing world-class analytic partners, Teradata supports the use of the evolving “R” technology, an open source language for statistical computing and graphics. “R” technology is gaining popularity with data scientists who are exploiting its new and innovative capabilities, which are not readily available. The enhanced “R add-on for Teradata” has a 50 percent performance improvement, it is easier to use, and its capabilities support large data analytics. Users can quickly profile, explore, and analyze larger quantities of data directly in the Teradata Database to deliver faster answers by leveraging embedded analytics.

Teradata has partnered with Revolution Analytics, the leading commercial provider of “R” technology, because of customer interest in high-performing R applications that deliver superior performance for large-scale data. “Our innovative customers understand that big data analytics takes a smart approach to the entire infrastructure and we will enable them to differentiate their business in a cost-effective way,” said David Rich, chief executive officer, Revolution Analytics. “We are excited to partner with Teradata, because we see great affinity between Teradata and Revolution Analytics – we embrace parallel computing and the high performance offered by multi-core and multi-processor hardware.”

and

The Teradata Data Lab empowers business users and leading analytic partners to start building new analytics in less than five minutes, as compared to waiting several weeks for the IT department’s assistance.

“The Data Lab within the Teradata database provides the perfect foundation to enable self-service predictive analytics with KXEN InfiniteInsight,” said John Ball, chief executive officer, KXEN. “Teradata technologies, combined with KXEN’s automated modeling capabilities and in-database scoring, put the power of predictive analytics and data mining directly into the hands of business users. This powerful combination helps our joint customers accelerate insight by delivering top-quality models in orders of magnitude faster than traditional approaches.”

Cloud Computing – can be evil

Cloud Computing can be evil because-

1) Most browsers are owned by for profit corporations . Corporations can be evil, sometimes

And corporations can go bankrupt. You can back up data locally, but try backing up a corporation.

2) The content on your web page can be changed using translator extensions . This has interesting ramifications as in George Orwell. You may not be even aware of subtle changes introduced in your browser in the way it renders the html or some words using keywords from a browser extension app.

Imagine a new form of language called Politically Correct Truthspeak, and that can be in English but using machine learning learn to substitute politically sensitive words with Govt sanctioned words.

3) Your DNS and IP settings can be redirected using extensions. This means if a Govt passes a law- you can be denied the websites using just the browser not even the ISP.

Thats an extreme scenario for a authoritative govt creating its own version of Mafiaafire Redirector.

So how to keep the cloud computer honest?Move some stuff to the desktop

How to keep desktop computing efficient?Use some more cloud computing

It is not an OR but an AND function in which some computing can be local, some shared and some in the cloud.

Si?

Interview Michal Kosinski , Concerto Web Based App using #Rstats

Here is an interview with Michal Kosinski , leader of the team that has created Concerto – a web based application using R. What is Concerto? As per http://www.psychometrics.cam.ac.uk/page/300/concerto-testing-platform.htm

Concerto is a web based, adaptive testing platform for creating and running rich, dynamic tests. It combines the flexibility of HTML presentation with the computing power of the R language, and the safety and performance of the MySQL database. It’s totally free for commercial and academic use, and it’s open source

Ajay- Describe your career in science from high school to this point. What are the various stats platforms you have trained on- and what do you think about their comparative advantages and disadvantages?

Michal- I started with maths, but quickly realized that I prefer social sciences – thus after one year, I switched to a psychology major and obtained my MSc in Social Psychology with a specialization in Consumer Behaviour. At that time I was mostly using SPSS – as it was the only statistical package that was taught to students in my department. Also, it was not too bad for small samples and the rather basic analyses I was performing at that time.

My more recent research performed during my Mphil course in Psychometrics at Cambridge University followed by my current PhD project in social networks and research work at Microsoft Research, requires significantly more powerful tools. Initially, I tried to squeeze as much as possible from SPSS/PASW by mastering the syntax language. SPSS was all I knew, though I reached its limits pretty quickly and was forced to switch to R. It was a pretty dreary experience at the start, switching from an unwieldy but familiar environment into an unwelcoming command line interface, but I’ve quickly realized how empowering and convenient this tool was.

I believe that a course in R should be obligatory for all students that are likely to come close to any data analysis in their careers. It is really empowering – once you got the basics you have the potential to use virtually any method there is, and automate most tasks related to analysing and processing data. It is also free and open-source – so you can use it wherever you work. Finally, it enables you to quickly and seamlessly migrate to other powerful environments such as Matlab, C, or Python.

Ajay- What was the motivation behind building Concerto?

Michal- We deal with a lot of online projects at the Psychometrics Centre – one of them attracted more than 7 million unique participants. We needed a powerful tool that would allow researchers and practitioners to conveniently build and deliver online tests.

Also, our relationships with the website designers and software engineers that worked on developing our tests were rather difficult. We had trouble successfully explaining our needs, each little change was implemented with a delay and at significant cost. Not to mention the difficulties with embedding some more advanced methods (such as adaptive testing) in our tests.

So we created a tool allowing us, psychometricians, to easily develop psychometric tests from scratch an publish them online. And all this without having to hire software developers.

Ajay -Why did you choose R as the background for Concerto? What other languages and platforms did you consider. Apart from Concerto, how else do you utilize R in your center, department and University?

Michal- R was a natural choice as it is open-source, free, and nicely integrates with a server environment. Also, we believe that it is becoming a universal statistical and data processing language in science. We put increasing emphasis on teaching R to our students and we hope that it will replace SPSS/PASW as a default statistical tool for social scientists.

Ajay -What all can Concerto do besides a computer adaptive test?

Michal- We did not plan it initially, but Concerto turned out to be extremely flexible. In a nutshell, it is a web interface to R engine with a built-in MySQL database and easy-to-use developer panel. It can be installed on both Windows and Unix systems and used over the network or locally.

Effectively, it can be used to build any kind of web application that requires a powerful and quickly deployable statistical engine. For instance, I envision an easy to use website (that could look a bit like SPSS) allowing students to analyse their data using a web browser alone (learning the underlying R code simultaneously). Also, the authors of R libraries (or anyone else) could use Concerto to build user-friendly web interfaces to their methods.

Finally, Concerto can be conveniently used to build simple non-adaptive tests and questionnaires. It might seem to be slightly less intuitive at first than popular questionnaire services (such us my favourite Survey Monkey), but has virtually unlimited flexibility when it comes to item format, test flow, feedback options, etc. Also, it’s free.

Ajay- How do you see the cloud computing paradigm growing? Do you think browser based computation is here to stay?

Michal – I believe that cloud infrastructure is the future. Dynamically sharing computational and network resources between online service providers has a great competitive advantage over traditional strategies to deal with network infrastructure. I am sure the security concerns will be resolved soon, finishing the transformation of the network infrastructure as we know it. On the other hand, however, I do not see a reason why client-side (or browser) processing of the information should cease to exist – I rather think that the border between the cloud and personal or local computer will continually dissolve.

About

Michal Kosinski is Director of Operations for The Psychometrics Centre and Leader of the e-Psychometrics Unit. He is also a research advisor to the Online Services and Advertising group at the Microsoft Research Cambridge, and a visiting lecturer at the Department of Mathematics in the University of Namur, Belgium. You can read more about him at http://www.michalkosinski.com/

Tag: Language

Easter Eggs in #Rstats