Tag: modelling

Interview Alain Chesnais Chief Scientist Trendspottr.com

Here is a brief interview with Alain Chesnais ,Chief Scientist  Trendspottr.com. It is a big honor to interview such a legend in computer science, and I am grateful to both him and Mark Zohar for taking time to write these down.
alain_chesnais2.jpg

Ajay-  Describe your career from your student days to being the President of ACM (Association of Computing Machinery http://www.acm.org/ ). How can we increase  the interest of students in STEM education, particularly in view of the shortage of data scientists.
 
Alain- I’m trying to sum up a career of over 35 years. This may be a bit long winded…
I started my career in CS when I was in high school in the early 70’s. I was accepted in the National Science Foundation’s Science Honors Program in 9th grade and the first course I took was a Fortran programming course at Columbia University. This was on an IBM 360 using punch cards.
The next year my high school got a donation from DEC of a PDP-8E mini computer. I ended up spending a lot of time in the machine room all through high school at a time when access to computers wasn’t all that common. I went to college in Paris and ended up at l’Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan in the newly created Computer Science department.
My first job after finishing my graduate studies was as a research assistant at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique where I focused my efforts on modelling the behaviour of distributed database systems in the presence of locking. When François Mitterand was elected president of France in 1981, he invited Nicholas Negroponte and Seymour Papert to come to France to set up the Centre Mondial Informatique. I was hired as a researcher there and continued on to become director of software development until it was closed down in 1986. I then started up my own company focusing on distributed computer graphics. We sold the company to Abvent in the early 90’s.
After that, I was hired by Thomson Digital Image to lead their rendering team. We were acquired by Wavefront Technologies in 1993 then by SGI in 1995 and merged with Alias Research. In the merged company: Alias|wavefront, I was director of engineering on the Maya project. Our team received an Oscar in 2003 for the creation of the Maya software system.
Since then I’ve worked at various companies, most recently focusing on social media and Big Data issues associated with it. Mark Zohar and I worked together at SceneCaster in 2007 where we developed a Facebook app that allowed users to create their own 3D scenes and share them with friends via Facebook without requiring a proprietary plugin. In December 2007 it was the most popular app in its category on Facebook.
Recently Mark approached me with a concept related to mining the content of public tweets to determine what was trending in real time. Using math similar to what I had developed during my graduate studies to model the performance of distributed databases in the presence of locking, we built up a real time analytics engine that ranks the content of tweets as they stream in. The math is designed to scale linearly in complexity with the volume of data that we analyze. That is the basis for what we have created for TrendSpottr.
In parallel to my professional career, I have been a very active volunteer at ACM. I started out as a member of the Paris ACM SIGGRAPH chapter in 1985 and volunteered to help do our mailings (snail mail at the time). After taking on more responsibilities with the chapter, I was elected chair of the chapter in 1991. I was first appointed to the SIGGRAPH Local Groups Steering Committee, then became ACM Director for Chapters. Later I was successively elected SIGGRAPH Vice Chair, ACM SIG Governing Board (SGB) Vice Chair for Operations, SGB Chair, ACM SIGGRAPH President, ACM Secretary/Treasurer, ACM Vice President, and finally, in 2010, I was elected ACM President. My term as ACM President has just ended on July 1st. Vint Cerf is our new President. I continue to serve on the ACM Executive Committee in my role as immediate Past President.
(Note- About ACM
ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery www.acm.org, is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting computing educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources and address the field’s challenges. )
Ajay- What sets Trendspotter apart from other startups out there in terms of vision in trying to achieve a more coherent experience on the web.
 
Alain- The Basic difference with other approaches that we are aware of is that we have developed an incremental solution that calculates the results on the fly as the data streams in. Our evaluators are based on solid mathematical foundations that have proven their usefulness over time. One way to describe what we do is to think of it as signal processing where the tweets are the signal and our evaluators are like triggers that tell you what elements of the signal have the characteristics that we are filtering for (velocity and acceleration). One key result of using this approach is that our unit cost per tweet analyzed does not go up with increased volume. Using more traditional data analysis approaches involving an implicit sort would imply a complexity of N*log(N), where N is the volume of tweets being analyzed. That would imply that the cost per tweet analyzed would go up with the volume of tweets. Our approach was designed to avoid that, so that we can maintain a cap on our unit costs of analysis, no matter what volume of data we analyze.
Ajay- What do you think is the future of big data visualization going to look like? What are some of the technologies that you are currently bullish on?
Alain- I see several trends that would have deep impact on Big Data visualization. I firmly believe that with large amounts of data, visualization is key tool for understanding both the structure and the relationships that exist between data elements. Let’s focus on some of the key things that are pushing in this direction:
  • the volume of data that is available is growing at a rate we have never seen before. Cisco has measured an 8 fold increase in the volume of IP traffic over the last 5 years and predicts that we will reach the zettabyte of data over IP in 2016
  • more of the data is becoming publicly available. This isn’t only on social networks such as Facebook and twitter, but joins a more general trend involving open research initiatives and open government programs
  • the desired time to get meaningful results is going down dramatically. In the past 5 years we have seen the half life of data on Facebook, defined as the amount of time that half of the public reactions to any given post (likes, shares., comments) take place, go from about 12 hours to under 3 hours currently
  • our access to the net is always on via mobile device. You are always connected.
  • the CPU and GPU capabilities of mobile devices is huge (an iPhone has 10 times the compute power of a Cray-1 and more graphics capabilities than early SGI workstations)
Put all of these observations together and you quickly come up with a massive opportunity to analyze data visually on the go as it happens no matter where you are. We can’t afford to have to wait for results. When something of interest occurs we need to be aware of it immediately.
Ajay- What are some of the applications we could use Trendspottr. Could we predict events like Arab Spring, or even the next viral thing.
 
Alain- TrendSpottr won’t predict what will happen next. What it *will* do is alert you immediately when it happens. You can think of it like a smoke detector. It doesn’t tell that a fire will take place, but it will save your life when a fire does break out.
Typical uses for TrendSpottr are
  • thought leadership by tracking content that your readership is interested in via TrendSpottr you can be seen as a thought leader on the subject by being one of the first to share trending content on a given subject. I personally do this on my Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/alain.chesnais) and have seen my klout score go up dramatically as a result
  • brand marketing to be able to know when something is trending about your brand and take advantage of it as it happens.
  • competitive analysis to see what is being said about two competing elements. For instance, searching TrendSpottr for “Obama OR Romney” gives you a very good understanding about how social networks are reacting to each politician. You can also do searches like “$aapl OR $msft OR $goog” to get a sense of what is the current buzz for certain hi tech stocks.
  • understanding your impact in real time to be able to see which of the content that you are posting is trending the most on social media so that you can highlight it on your main page. So if all of your content is hosted on common domain name (ourbrand.com), searching for ourbrand.com will show you the most active of your site’s content. That can easily be set up by putting a TrendSpottr widget on your front page

Ajay- What are some of the privacy guidelines that you keep in  mind- given the fact that you collect individual information but also have government agencies as potential users.

 
Alain- We take privacy very seriously and anonymize all of the data that we collect. We don’t keep explicit records of the data we collected through the various incoming streams and only store the aggregate results of our analysis.
About–
Alain Chesnais is immediate Past President of ACM, elected for the two-year term beginning July 1, 2010.Chesnais studied at l’Ecole Normale Supérieure de l’Enseignement Technique and l’Université de Paris where he earned a Maîtrise de Mathematiques, a Maitrise de Structure Mathématique de l’Informatique, and a Diplôme d’Etudes Approfondies in Compuer Science. He was a high school student at the United Nations International School in New York, where, along with preparing his International Baccalaureate with a focus on Math, Physics and Chemistry, he also studied Mandarin Chinese.Chesnais recently founded Visual Transitions, which specializes in helping companies move to HTML 5, the newest standard for structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web. He was the CTO of SceneCaster.com from June 2007 until April 2010, and was Vice President of Product Development at Tucows Inc. from July 2005 – May 2007. He also served as director of engineering at Alias|Wavefront on the team that received an Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for developing the Maya 3D software package.

Prior to his election as ACM president, Chesnais was vice president from July 2008 – June 2010 as well as secretary/treasurer from July 2006 – June 2008. He also served as president of ACM SIGGRAPH from July 2002 – June 2005 and as SIG Governing Board Chair from July 2000 – June 2002.

As a French citizen now residing in Canada, he has more than 20 years of management experience in the software industry. He joined the local SIGGRAPH Chapter in Paris some 20 years ago as a volunteer and has continued his involvement with ACM in a variety of leadership capacities since then.

About Trendspottr.com

TrendSpottr is a real-time viral search and predictive analytics service that identifies the most timely and trending information for any topic or keyword. Our core technology analyzes real-time data streams and spots emerging trends at their earliest acceleration point — hours or days before they have become “popular” and reached mainstream awareness.

TrendSpottr serves as a predictive early warning system for news and media organizations, brands, government agencies and Fortune 500 companies and helps them to identify emerging news, events and issues that have high viral potential and market impact. TrendSpottr has partnered with HootSuite, DataSift and other leading social and big data companies.

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.

Interview Rapid-I -Ingo Mierswa and Simon Fischer

Here is an interview with Dr Ingo Mierswa , CEO of Rapid -I and Dr Simon Fischer, Head R&D. Rapid-I makes the very popular software Rapid Miner – perhaps one of the earliest leading open source software in business analytics and business intelligence. It is quite easy to use, deploy and with it’s extensions and innovations (including compatibility with R )has continued to grow tremendously through the years.

In an extensive interview Ingo and Simon talk about algorithms marketplace, extensions , big data analytics, hadoop, mobile computing and use of the graphical user interface in analytics.

Special Thanks to Nadja from Rapid I communication team for helping coordinate this interview.( Statuary Blogging Disclosure- Rapid I is a marketing partner with Decisionstats as per the terms in https://decisionstats.com/privacy-3/)

Ajay- Describe your background in science. What are the key lessons that you have learnt while as scientific researcher and what advice would you give to new students today.

Ingo: My time as researcher really was a great experience which has influenced me a lot. I have worked at the AI lab of Prof. Dr. Katharina Morik, one of the persons who brought machine learning and data mining to Europe. Katharina always believed in what we are doing, encouraged us and gave us the space for trying out new things. Funnily enough, I never managed to use my own scientific results in any real-life project so far but I consider this as a quite common gap between science and the “real world”. At Rapid-I, however, we are still heavily connected to the scientific world and try to combine the best of both worlds: solving existing problems with leading-edge technologies.

Simon: In fact, during my academic career I have not worked in the field of data mining at all. I worked on a field some of my colleagues would probably even consider boring, and that is theoretical computer science. To be precise, my research was in the intersection of game theory and network theory. During that time, I have learnt a lot of exciting things, none of which had any business use. Still, I consider that a very valuable experience. When we at Rapid-I hire people coming to us right after graduating, I don’t care whether they know the latest technology with a fancy three-letter acronym – that will be forgotten more quickly than it came. What matters is the way you approach new problems and challenges. And that is also my recommendation to new students: work on whatever you like, as long as you are passionate about it and it brings you forward.

Ajay-  How is the Rapid Miner Extensions marketplace moving along. Do you think there is a scope for people to say create algorithms in a platform like R , and then offer that algorithm as an app for sale just like iTunes or Android apps.

 Simon: Well, of course it is not going to be exactly like iTunes or Android apps are, because of the more business-orientated character. But in fact there is a scope for that, yes. We have talked to several developers, e.g., at our user conference RCOMM, and several people would be interested in such an opportunity. Companies using data mining software need supported software packages, not just something they downloaded from some anonymous server, and that is only possible through a platform like the new Marketplace. Besides that, the marketplace will not only host commercial extensions. It is also meant to be a platform for all the developers that want to publish their extensions to a broader community and make them accessible in a comfortable way. Of course they could just place them on their personal Web pages, but who would find them there? From the Marketplace, they are installable with a single click.

Ingo: What I like most about the new Rapid-I Marketplace is the fact that people can now get something back for their efforts. Developing a new algorithm is a lot of work, in some cases even more that developing a nice app for your mobile phone. It is completely accepted that people buy apps from a store for a couple of Dollars and I foresee the same for sharing and selling algorithms instead of apps. Right now, people can already share algorithms and extensions for free, one of the next versions will also support selling of those contributions. Let’s see what’s happening next, maybe we will add the option to sell complete RapidMiner workflows or even some data pools…

Ajay- What are the recent features in Rapid Miner that support cloud computing, mobile computing and tablets. How do you think the landscape for Big Data (over 1 Tb ) is changing and how is Rapid Miner adapting to it.

Simon: These are areas we are very active in. For instance, we have an In-Database-Mining Extension that allows the user to run their modelling algorithms directly inside the database, without ever loading the data into memory. Using analytic databases like Vectorwise or Infobright, this technology can really boost performance. Our data mining server, RapidAnalytics, already offers functionality to send analysis processes into the cloud. In addition to that, we are currently preparing a research project dealing with data mining in the cloud. A second project is targeted towards the other aspect you mention: the use of mobile devices. This is certainly a growing market, of course not for designing and running analyses, but for inspecting reports and results. But even that is tricky: When you have a large screen you can display fancy and comprehensive interactive dashboards with drill downs and the like. On a mobile device, that does not work, so you must bring your reports and visualizations very much to the point. And this is precisely what data mining can do – and what is hard to do for classical BI.

Ingo: Then there is Radoop, which you may have heard of. It uses the Apache Hadoop framework for large-scale distributed computing to execute RapidMiner processes in the cloud. Radoop has been presented at this year’s RCOMM and people are really excited about the combination of RapidMiner with Hadoop and the scalability this brings.

 Ajay- Describe the Rapid Miner analytics certification program and what steps are you taking to partner with academic universities.

Ingo: The Rapid-I Certification Program was created to recognize professional users of RapidMiner or RapidAnalytics. The idea is that certified users have demonstrated a deep understanding of the data analysis software solutions provided by Rapid-I and how they are used in data analysis projects. Taking part in the Rapid-I Certification Program offers a lot of benefits for IT professionals as well as for employers: professionals can demonstrate their skills and employers can make sure that they hire qualified professionals. We started our certification program only about 6 months ago and until now about 100 professionals have been certified so far.

Simon: During our annual user conference, the RCOMM, we have plenty of opportunities to talk to people from academia. We’re also present at other conferences, e.g. at ECML/PKDD, and we are sponsoring data mining challenges and grants. We maintain strong ties with several universities all over Europe and the world, which is something that I would not want to miss. We are also cooperating with institutes like the ITB in Dublin during their training programmes, e.g. by giving lectures, etc. Also, we are leading or participating in several national or EU-funded research projects, so we are still close to academia. And we offer an academic discount on all our products 🙂

Ajay- Describe the global efforts in making Rapid Miner a truly international software including spread of developers, clients and employees.

Simon: Our clients already are very international. We have a partner network in America, Asia, and Australia, and, while I am responding to these questions, we have a training course in the US. Developers working on the core of RapidMiner and RapidAnalytics, however, are likely to stay in Germany for the foreseeable future. We need specialists for that, and it would be pointless to spread the development team over the globe. That is also owed to the agile philosophy that we are following.

Ingo: Simon is right, Rapid-I already is acting on an international level. Rapid-I now has more than 300 customers from 39 countries in the world which is a great result for a young company like ours. We are of course very strong in Germany and also the rest of Europe, but also concentrate on more countries by means of our very successful partner network. Rapid-I continues to build this partner network and to recruit dynamic and knowledgeable partners and in the future. However, extending and acting globally is definitely part of our strategic roadmap.

Biography–

Dr. Ingo Mierswa is working as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Rapid-I. He has several years of experience in project management, human resources management, consulting, and leadership including eight years of coordinating and leading the multi-national RapidMiner developer team with about 30 developers and contributors world-wide. He wrote his Phd titled “Non-Convex and Multi-Objective Optimization for Numerical Feature Engineering and Data Mining” at the University of Dortmund under the supervision of Prof. Morik.

Dr. Simon Fischer is heading the research & development at Rapid-I. His interests include game theory and networks, the theory of evolutionary algorithms (e.g. on the Ising model), and theoretical and practical aspects of data mining. He wrote his PhD in Aachen where he worked in the project “Design and Analysis of Self-Regulating Protocols for Spectrum Assignment” within the excellence cluster UMIC. Before, he was working on the vtraffic project within the DFG Programme 1126 “Algorithms for large and complex networks”.

http://rapid-i.com/content/view/181/190/ tells you more on the various types of Rapid Miner licensing for enterprise, individual and developer versions.

(Note from Ajay- to receive an early edition invite to Radoop, click here http://radoop.eu/z1sxe)

 

RapidMiner launches extensions marketplace

For some time now, I had been hoping for a place where new package or algorithm developers get at least a fraction of the money that iPad or iPhone application developers get. Rapid Miner has taken the lead in establishing a marketplace for extensions. Is there going to be paid extensions as well- I hope so!!

This probably makes it the first “app” marketplace in open source and the second app marketplace in analytics after salesforce.com

It is hard work to think of new algols, and some of them can really be usefull.

Can we hope for #rstats marketplace where people downloading say ggplot3.0 atleast get a prompt to donate 99 cents per download to Hadley Wickham’s Amazon wishlist. http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/1Y65N3VFA613B

Do you think it is okay to pay 99 cents per iTunes song, but not pay a cent for open source software.

I dont know- but I am just a capitalist born in a country that was socialist for the first 13 years of my life. Congratulations once again to Rapid Miner for innovating and leading the way.

http://rapid-i.com/component/option,com_myblog/show,Rapid-I-Marketplace-Launched.html/Itemid,172

RapidMiner, Marketplace, Extensions 30 May 2011
Rapid-I Marketplace Launched by Simon Fischer

Over the years, many of you have been developing new RapidMiner Extensions dedicated to a broad set of topics. Whereas these extensions are easy to install in RapidMiner – just download and place them in the plugins folder – the hard part is to find them in the vastness that is the Internet. Extensions made by ourselves at Rapid-I, on the other hand,  are distributed by the update server making them searchable and installable directly inside RapidMiner.

We thought that this was a bit unfair, so we decieded to open up the update server to the public, and not only this, we even gave it a new look and name. The Rapid-I Marketplace is available in beta mode at http://rapidupdate.de:8180/ . You can use the Web interface to browse, comment, and rate the extensions, and you can use the update functionality in RapidMiner by going to the preferences and entering http://rapidupdate.de:8180/UpdateServer/ as the update server URL. (Once the beta test is complete, we will change the port back to 80 so we won’t have any firewall problems.)

As an Extension developer, just register with the Marketplace and drop me an email (fischer at rapid-i dot com) so I can give you permissions to upload your own extension. Upload is simple provided you use the standard RapidMiner Extension build process and will boost visibility of your extension.

Looking forward to see many new extensions there soon!

Disclaimer- Decisionstats is a partner of Rapid Miner. I have been liking the software for a long long time, and recently agreed to partner with them just like I did with KXEN some years back, and with Predictive AnalyticsConference, and Aster Data until last year.

I still think Rapid Miner is a very very good software,and a globally created software after SAP.

Here is the actual marketplace

http://rapidupdate.de:8180/UpdateServer/faces/index.xhtml

Welcome to the Rapid-I Marketplace Public Beta Test

The Rapid-I Marketplace will soon replace the RapidMiner update server. Using this marketplace, you can share your RapidMiner extensions and make them available for download by the community of RapidMiner users. Currently, we are beta testing this server. If you want to use this server in RapidMiner, you must go to the preferences and enter http://rapidupdate.de:8180/UpdateServer for the update url. After the beta test, we will change the port back to 80, which is currently occupied by the old update server. You can test the marketplace as a user (downloading extensions) and as an Extension developer. If you want to publish your extension here, please let us know via the contact form.

Hot Downloads
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[Icon]The Image Processing Extension provides operators for handling image data. You can extract attributes describing colour and texture in the image, you can make several transformation of a image data which allows you to perform segmentation and detection of suspicious areas in image data.The extension provides many of image transformation and extraction operators ranging from Wavelet Decomposition, Hough Circle to Block Difference of Inverse probabilities.
[Icon]RapidMiner is unquestionably the world-leading open-source system for data mining. It is available as a stand-alone application for data analysis and as a data mining engine for the integration into own products. Thousands of applications of RapidMiner in more than 40 countries give their users a competitive edge.

  • Data Integration, Analytical ETL, Data Analysis, and Reporting in one single suite
  • Powerful but intuitive graphical user interface for the design of analysis processes
  • Repositories for process, data and meta data handling
  • Only solution with meta data transformation: forget trial and error and inspect results already during design time
  • Only solution which supports on-the-fly error recognition and quick fixes
  • Complete and flexible: Hundreds of data loading, data transformation, data modeling, and data visualization methods
[Icon]All modeling methods and attribute evaluation methods from the Weka machine learning library are available within RapidMiner. After installing this extension you will get access to about 100 additional modelling schemes including additional decision trees, rule learners and regression estimators.This extension combines two of the most widely used open source data mining solutions. By installing it, you can extend RapidMiner to everything what is possible with Weka while keeping the full analysis, preprocessing, and visualization power of RapidMiner.
[Icon]Finally, the two most widely used data analysis solutions – RapidMiner and R – are connected. Arbitrary R models and scripts can now be directly integrated into the RapidMiner analysis processes. The new R perspective offers the known R console together with the great plotting facilities of R. All variables and R scripts can be organized in the RapidMiner Repository.A directly included online help and multi-line editing makes the creation of R scripts much more comfortable.
Related articles

#Rstats for Business Intelligence

This is a short list of several known as well as lesser known R ( #rstats) language codes, packages and tricks to build a business intelligence application. It will be slightly Messy (and not Messi) but I hope to refine it someday when the cows come home.

It assumes that BI is basically-

a Database, a Document Database, a Report creation/Dashboard pulling software as well unique R packages for business intelligence.

What is business intelligence?

Seamless dissemination of data in the organization. In short let it flow- from raw transactional data to aggregate dashboards, to control and test experiments, to new and legacy data mining models- a business intelligence enabled organization allows information to flow easily AND capture insights and feedback for further action.

BI software has lately meant to be just reporting software- and Business Analytics has meant to be primarily predictive analytics. the terms are interchangeable in my opinion -as BI reports can also be called descriptive aggregated statistics or descriptive analytics, and predictive analytics is useless and incomplete unless you measure the effect in dashboards and summary reports.

Data Mining- is a bit more than predictive analytics- it includes pattern recognizability as well as black box machine learning algorithms. To further aggravate these divides, students mostly learn data mining in computer science, predictive analytics (if at all) in business departments and statistics, and no one teaches metrics , dashboards, reporting  in mainstream academia even though a large number of graduates will end up fiddling with spreadsheets or dashboards in real careers.

Using R with

1) Databases-

I created a short list of database connectivity with R here at https://rforanalytics.wordpress.com/odbc-databases-for-r/ but R has released 3 new versions since then.

The RODBC package remains the package of choice for connecting to SQL Databases.

http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/RODBC/RODBC.pdf

Details on creating DSN and connecting to Databases are given at  https://rforanalytics.wordpress.com/odbc-databases-for-r/

For document databases like MongoDB and CouchDB

( what is the difference between traditional RDBMS and NoSQL if you ever need to explain it in a cocktail conversation http://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/5/what-are-the-differences-between-nosql-and-a-traditional-rdbms

Basically dispensing with the relational setup, with primary and foreign keys, and with the additional overhead involved in keeping transactional safety, often gives you extreme increases in performance

NoSQL is a kind of database that doesn’t have a fixed schema like a traditional RDBMS does. With the NoSQL databases the schema is defined by the developer at run time. They don’t write normal SQL statements against the database, but instead use an API to get the data that they need.

instead relating data in one table to another you store things as key value pairs and there is no database schema, it is handled instead in code.)

I believe any corporation with data driven decision making would need to both have atleast one RDBMS and one NoSQL for unstructured data-Ajay. This is a sweeping generic statement 😉 , and is an opinion on future technologies.

  • Use RMongo

From- http://tommy.chheng.com/2010/11/03/rmongo-accessing-mongodb-in-r/

http://plindenbaum.blogspot.com/2010/09/connecting-to-mongodb-database-from-r.html

Connecting to a MongoDB database from R using Java

http://nsaunders.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/connecting-to-a-mongodb-database-from-r-using-java/

Also see a nice basic analysis using R Mongo from

http://pseudofish.com/blog/2011/05/25/analysis-of-data-with-mongodb-and-r/

For CouchDB

please see https://github.com/wactbprot/R4CouchDB and

http://digitheadslabnotebook.blogspot.com/2010/10/couchdb-and-r.html

  • First install RCurl and RJSONIO. You’ll have to download the tar.gz’s if you’re on a Mac. For the second part, we’ll need to installR4CouchDB,

2) External Report Creating Software-

Jaspersoft- It has good integration with R and is a certified Revolution Analytics partner (who seem to be the only ones with a coherent #Rstats go to market strategy- which begs the question – why is the freest and finest stats software having only ONE vendor- if it was so great lots of companies would make exclusive products for it – (and some do -see https://rforanalytics.wordpress.com/r-business-solutions/ and https://rforanalytics.wordpress.com/using-r-from-other-software/)

From

http://www.jaspersoft.com/sites/default/files/downloads/events/Analytics%20-Jaspersoft-SEP2010.pdf

we see

http://jasperforge.org/projects/rrevodeployrbyrevolutionanalytics

RevoConnectR for JasperReports Server

RevoConnectR for JasperReports Server RevoConnectR for JasperReports Server is a Java library interface between JasperReports Server and Revolution R Enterprise’s RevoDeployR, a standardized collection of web services that integrates security, APIs, scripts and libraries for R into a single server. JasperReports Server dashboards can retrieve R charts and result sets from RevoDeployR.

http://jasperforge.org/plugins/esp_frs/optional_download.php?group_id=409

 

Using R and Pentaho
Extending Pentaho with R analytics”R” is a popular open source statistical and analytical language that academics and commercial organizations alike have used for years to get maximum insight out of information using advanced analytic techniques. In this twelve-minute video, David Reinke from Pentaho Certified Partner OpenBI provides an overview of R, as well as a demonstration of integration between R and Pentaho.
and from
R and BI – Integrating R with Open Source Business
Intelligence Platforms Pentaho and Jaspersoft
David Reinke, Steve Miller
Keywords: business intelligence
Increasingly, R is becoming the tool of choice for statistical analysis, optimization, machine learning and
visualization in the business world. This trend will only escalate as more R analysts transition to business
from academia. But whereas in academia R is often the central tool for analytics, in business R must coexist
with and enhance mainstream business intelligence (BI) technologies. A modern BI portfolio already includes
relational databeses, data integration (extract, transform, load – ETL), query and reporting, online analytical
processing (OLAP), dashboards, and advanced visualization. The opportunity to extend traditional BI with
R analytics revolves on the introduction of advanced statistical modeling and visualizations native to R. The
challenge is to seamlessly integrate R capabilities within the existing BI space. This presentation will explain
and demo an initial approach to integrating R with two comprehensive open source BI (OSBI) platforms –
Pentaho and Jaspersoft. Our efforts will be successful if we stimulate additional progress, transparency and
innovation by combining the R and BI worlds.
The demonstration will show how we integrated the OSBI platforms with R through use of RServe and
its Java API. The BI platforms provide an end user web application which include application security,
data provisioning and BI functionality. Our integration will demonstrate a process by which BI components
can be created that prompt the user for parameters, acquire data from a relational database and pass into
RServer, invoke R commands for processing, and display the resulting R generated statistics and/or graphs
within the BI platform. Discussion will include concepts related to creating a reusable java class library of
commonly used processes to speed additional development.

If you know Java- try http://ramanareddyg.blog.com/2010/07/03/integrating-r-and-pentaho-data-integration/

 

and I like this list by two venerable powerhouses of the BI Open Source Movement

http://www.openbi.com/demosarticles.html

Open Source BI as disruptive technology

http://www.openbi.biz/articles/osbi_disruption_openbi.pdf

Open Source Punditry

TITLE AUTHOR COMMENTS
Commercial Open Source BI Redux Dave Reinke & Steve Miller An review and update on the predictions made in our 2007 article focused on the current state of the commercial open source BI market. Also included is a brief analysis of potential options for commercial open source business models and our take on their applicability.
Open Source BI as Disruptive Technology Dave Reinke & Steve Miller Reprint of May 2007 DM Review article explaining how and why Commercial Open Source BI (COSBI) will disrupt the traditional proprietary market.

Spotlight on R

TITLE AUTHOR COMMENTS
R You Ready for Open Source Statistics? Steve Miller R has become the “lingua franca” for academic statistical analysis and modeling, and is now rapidly gaining exposure in the commercial world. Steve examines the R technology and community and its relevancy to mainstream BI.
R and BI (Part 1): Data Analysis with R Steve Miller An introduction to R and its myriad statistical graphing techniques.
R and BI (Part 2): A Statistical Look at Detail Data Steve Miller The usage of R’s graphical building blocks – dotplots, stripplots and xyplots – to create dashboards which require little ink yet tell a big story.
R and BI (Part 3): The Grooming of Box and Whiskers Steve Miller Boxplots and variants (e.g. Violin Plot) are explored as an essential graphical technique to summarize data distributions by categories and dimensions of other attributes.
R and BI (Part 4): Embellishing Graphs Steve Miller Lattices and logarithmic data transformations are used to illuminate data density and distribution and find patterns otherwise missed using classic charting techniques.
R and BI (Part 5): Predictive Modelling Steve Miller An introduction to basic predictive modelling terminology and techniques with graphical examples created using R.
R and BI (Part 6) :
Re-expressing Data		 Steve Miller How do you deal with highly skewed data distributions? Standard charting techniques on this “deviant” data often fail to illuminate relationships. This article explains techniques to re-express skewed data so that it is more understandable.
The Stock Market, 2007 Steve Miller R-based dashboards are presented to demonstrate the return performance of various asset classes during 2007.
Bootstrapping for Portfolio Returns: The Practice of Statistical Analysis Steve Miller Steve uses the R open source stats package and Monte Carlo simulations to examine alternative investment portfolio returns…a good example of applied statistics using R.
Statistical Graphs for Portfolio Returns Steve Miller Steve uses the R open source stats package to analyze market returns by asset class with some very provocative embedded trellis charts.
Frank Harrell, Iowa State and useR!2007 Steve Miller In August, Steve attended the 2007 Internation R User conference (useR!2007). This article details his experiences, including his meeting with long-time R community expert, Frank Harrell.
An Open Source Statistical “Dashboard” for Investment Performance Steve Miller The newly launched Dashboard Insight web site is focused on the most useful of BI tools: dashboards. With this article discussing the use of R and trellis graphics, OpenBI brings the realm of open source to this forum.
Unsexy Graphics for Business Intelligence Steve Miller Utilizing Tufte’s philosophy of maximizing the data to ink ratio of graphics, Steve demonstrates the value in dot plot diagramming. The R open source statistical/analytics software is showcased.
I think that the report generation package Brew would also qualify as a BI package, but large scale implementation remains to be seen in
a commercial business environment
  • brew: Creating Repetitive Reports
 brew: Templating Framework for Report Generation

brew implements a templating framework for mixing text and R code for report generation. brew template syntax is similar to PHP, Ruby's erb module, Java Server Pages, and Python's psp module. http://bit.ly/jINmaI
  • Yarr- creating reports in R
to be continued ( when I have more time and the temperature goes down from 110F in Delhi, India)
Related articles

The Latest GUI for R- BioR

Once more a spanking new shiny software –

Bio7 is a integrated development environment for ecological modelling based on the Rich-Client-Platformconcept of the Java IDE Eclipse. The Bio7 platform contains several perspectives which arrange several views for a special purpose useful for the development and analysis of ecological models. One special perspective bundles a feature rich GUI (Graphical User Interface) for the statistical software R.
For the bidirectional communication between Java and R the Rserve application is used (as a backend to evaluate R code and transfer data from and to Java).
The Bio7 R perspective (see figure below) is divided into a R-Shell view on the left side (conceptual the R side) and a Table view on the right side (conceptual the Java side).
Data can be imported to a spreadsheet, edited and then transferred to the R workspace. Vice versa data from R can be transferred to a sheet of the Table view and then exported e.g. to an Excel or OpenOffice file.

and

General:

Built upon Eclipse 3.6.1.

Now works with the latest Java version! (Windows version bundled with the latest JRE release).

Removed the Soil perspective (now soils can be modeled with ImageJ (float precision). Active images can be displayed in the 3D discrete view (new example available).

Removed the database perspective and the plant layer. You can now built any discrete models without any plant layer.

Removed several controls in the Control view. Added the “Custom Controls” view. In addition ported the Swing component of the Time panel to Swt.

Deleted the avi to swf converter in the ImageJ menu.

Now patterns can be saved with opened Java editor source. If this file is reopened and dragged on Bio7 the pattern is loaded, the source is compiled and the setup method (if available) is executed. In this way model files can be used for presentations ->drag, setup and run. The save actions are located in the Speadsheet view toolbar.

More options available to disable panel painting and recording of values (if not needed for speed!).

New Setup button in the toolbar of Bio7 to trigger a compiled setup method if available.

Removed the load and save pattern buttons from the toolbar of Bio7. Discrete patterns can now be stored with the available action in the spreadsheet view menu.

New P2 Update Manager available in Bio7.

Updated the Janino Compiler.

New HTML perspective added with a view which embeds the TinyMC editor.

New options to disable painting operations for the discrete panels.

New option to explicitly enable scripts at startup (for a faster startup).

Quadgrid (Hexgrid)

Only states are now available which can be created in the “Spreadsheet” view menu easily. Patterns can be stored and restored as usual but are now stored in an *.exml file.

New method to transfer the quadgrid pattern as a matrix to R.

New method to transfer the population data of all quadgrid states to R.

ImageJ:

Update to the latest version (with additional fixes).

Fixed a bug to rename the image.

Thumbnail browser can now open images recursevely(limited to 1000 pics), the magnifiyng glass can be disabled, too.

Plugins can be installed dynamically with a drag and drop operation on the ImageJ view or toolbar (as known from ImageJ).

Installed plugins now extend the plugin menu as submenus or subsubmenus (not finished yet!).

Plugins can now be created with the Java editor. New Bio7 Wizard available to create a plugin template.

Compiled Java files can be added to a *.jar file with a new available action in the Navigator view (if you rightclick on the files in the Navigator). In this way ImageJ plugins can be packaged in a *.jar.

Floweditor:

Fixed a repaint bug in the debug mode of a flow (now draws correctly the active shape in the flow).

Resize with Strg+Scrollwheel works again.

Comments with more than one line works again.

New Test action to verify connections in a flow.

Debug mode now shows all executed Shapes.

Integrated more default tests (for the verification of a regular flow).

A mouse-click now deletes colored shapes in a flow (e.g. in debug mode).

Points panel:

Integrated (dynamic) Voronoi, Delauney visualization (with area and clip to rectangle action).

Points coordinates can now be set in double precision.

Transfer of point coordinates to R now in double precision.

Bio7 Table:

New import and export of Excel 2007 OOXML.

Row headers can now be resized with the mouse device.

R:

Updated R (2.12.1) and Rserve (0.6.3) to the latest version.

New help action in the R-Shell view.

New action to display help for R specific commands in the embedded Bio7 browser (which opens automatically).

New Key actions to copy the selected variable names to the expression dialog (c=cocatenate (+), a=add (,)).

New action to transfer character or numeric vectors horizontally or vertically in an opened spread (Table view) at selection coordinates.

Empty spaces in the filepath are now allowed under Windows if Rserve is started with a system shell or the RGUI (for the tempfile select a location in the Preferences dialog which is writeable) is started.This works also for the RGUI action.

Improved the search for the “Install packages” action (option “Case Sensitive” added).

API:

New API methods available!

And:

Many fixes since the last version!

 

Installation

Important information:

A certain firewall software can corrupt the Bio7 *.zip file (as well as other files).
Please ensure that you have downloaded a functioning Bio7 1.5 version. In addition it is also reported that a certain antivirus software detects the bundled R software (on Windows) as malware. Often the R specific “open.exe” is detected as malware. Please use a different scanner to make sure that the software is not infected if you have any doubts. For more details see:

http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/trojan-at-current-development-version-td3244348.html

 

Related Articles

PAW Videos

A message from Predictive Analytics World on  newly available videos. It has many free videos as well so you can check them out.

Predictive Analytics World March 2011 in San Francisco

Access PAW DC Session Videos Now

Predictive Analytics World is pleased to announce on-demand access to the videos of PAW Washington DC, October 2010, including over 30 sessions and keynotes that you may view at your convenience. Access this leading predictive analytics content online now:

View the PAW DC session videos online

Register by January 18th and receive $150 off the full 2-day conference program videos (enter code PAW150 at checkout)

Trial videos – view the following for no charge:

Select individual conference sessions, or recognize savings by registering for access to one or two full days of sessions. These on-demand videos deliver PAW DC right to your desk, covering hot topics and advanced methods such as:

Social data 

Text mining

Search marketing

Risk management

Survey analysis

Consumer privacy

Sales force optimization

Response & cross-sell

Recommender systems

 Featuring experts such as:
Usama Fayyad, Ph.D.
CEO, Open Insights Former Chief Data Officer, Yahoo!
Andrew Pole
Sr Mgr, Media/DB Mktng
Target
View Keynote for Free

John F. Elder, Ph.D.
CEO and Founder
Elder Research
Bruno Aziza
Director, Worldwide Strategy Lead, BI
Microsoft
Eric Siegel, Ph.D.
Conference Chair
Predictive Analytics World

PAW DC videos feature over 25 speakers with case studies from leading enterprises such as: CIBC, CEB, Forrester, Macy’s, MetLife, Microsoft, Miles Kimball, Monster.com, Oracle, Paychex, SunTrust, Target, UPMC, Xerox, Yahoo!, YMCA, and more.

How video access works:

View Slides on the Left See & Hear Speaker in the Right Window

Sign up by January 18 for immediate video access and $150 discount
San Francisco
March 14-15, 2011		 Washington DC
October, 2011		 London
November, 2011
Contact Us

Produced by:

 
Session Gallery: Day 1 of 2

Viewing (17) Sessions of (31)

 

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Keynote: Five Ways Predictive Analytics Cuts Enterprise Risk  

Eric Siegel, Ph.D., Program Chair, Predictive Analytics World

All business is an exercise in risk management. All organizations would benefit from measuring, tracking and computing risk as a core process, much like insurance companies do.

Predictive analytics does the trick, one customer at a time. This technology is a data-driven means to compute the risk each customer will defect, not respond to an expensive mailer, consume a retention discount even if she were not going to leave in the first place, not be targeted for a telephone solicitation that would have landed a sale, commit fraud, or become a “loss customer” such as a bad debtor or an insurance policy-holder with high claims.

In this keynote session, Dr. Eric Siegel reveals:

– Five ways predictive analytics evolves your enterprise to reduce risk

– Hidden sources of risk across operational functions

– What every business should learn from insurance companies

– How advancements have reversed the very meaning of fraud

– Why “man + machine” teams are greater than the sum of their parts for enterprise decision support

Length – 00:45:57 | Email to a Colleague

Price: $195

 

 

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Play video of session: Platinum Sponsor Presentation, Analytics: The Beauty of Diversity
Platinum Sponsor Presentation: Analytics – The Beauty of Diversity 

Anne H. Milley, Senior Director of Analytic Strategy, Worldwide Product Marketing, SAS

Analytics contributes to, and draws from, multiple disciplines. The unifying theme of “making the world a better place” is bred from diversity. For instance, the same methods used in econometrics might be used in market research, psychometrics and other disciplines. In a similar way, diverse paradigms are needed to best solve problems, reveal opportunities and make better decisions. This is why we evolve capabilities to formulate and solve a wide range of problems through multiple integrated languages and interfaces. Extending that, we have provided integration with other languages so that users can draw on the disciplines and paradigms needed to best practice their craft.

Length – 20:11 | Email to a Colleague

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Play video of session: Gold Sponsor Presentation Predictive Analytics Accelerate Insight for Financial Services
Gold Sponsor Presentation: Predictive Analytics Accelerate Insight for Financial Services 

Finbarr Deely, Director of Business Development,ParAccel

Financial services organizations face immense hurdles in maintaining profitability and building competitive advantage. Financial services organizations must perform “what-if” scenario analysis, identify risks, and detect fraud patterns. The advanced analytic complexity required often makes such analysis slow and painful, if not impossible. This presentation outlines the analytic challenges facing these organizations and provides a clear path to providing the accelerated insight needed to perform in today’s complex business environment to reduce risk, stop fraud and increase profits. * The value of predictive analytics in Accelerating Insight * Financial Services Analytic Case Studies * Brief Overview of ParAccel Analytic Database

Length – 09:06 | Email to a Colleague

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TOPIC: BUSINESS VALUE
Case Study: Monster.com
Creating Global Competitive Power with Predictive Analytics 

Jean Paul Isson, Vice President, Globab BI & Predictive Analytics, Monster Worldwide

Using Predictive analytics to gain a deeper understanding of customer behaviours, increase marketing ROI and drive growth

– Creating global competitive power with business intelligence: Making the right decisions – at the right time

– Avoiding common change management challenges in sales, marketing, customer service, and products

– Developing a BI vision – and implementing it: successful business intelligence implementation models

– Using predictive analytics as a business driver to stay on top of the competition

– Following the Monster Worldwide global BI evolution: How Monster used BI to go from good to great

Length – 51:17 | Email to a Colleague

Price: $195

 

 

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TOPIC: SURVEY ANALYSIS
Case Study: YMCA
Turning Member Satisfaction Surveys into an Actionable Narrative 

Dean Abbott, President, Abbott Analytics

Employees are a key constituency at the Y and previous analysis has shown that their attitudes have a direct bearing on Member Satisfaction. This session will describe a successful approach for the analysis of YMCA employee surveys. Decision trees are built and examined in depth to identify key questions in describing key employee satisfaction metrics, including several interesting groupings of employee attitudes. Our approach will be contrasted with other factor analysis and regression-based approaches to survey analysis that we used initially. The predictive models described are currently in use and resulted in both greater understanding of employee attitudes, and a revised “short-form” survey with fewer key questions identified by the decision trees as the most important predictors.

Length – 50:19 | Email to a Colleague

Price: $195

 

 

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TOPIC: INDUSTRY TRENDS
2010 Data Minter Survey Results: Highlights 

Karl Rexer, Ph.D., Rexer Analytics

Do you want to know the views, actions, and opinions of the data mining community? Each year, Rexer Analytics conducts a global survey of data miners to find out. This year at PAW we unveil the results of our 4th Annual Data Miner Survey. This session will present the research highlights, such as:

– Analytic goals & key challenges

– Impact of the economy

– Regional differences

– Text mining trends

Length – 15:20 | Email to a Colleague

Price: $195

 

 

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Multiple Case Studies: U.S. DoD, U.S. DHS, SSA
Text Mining: Lessons Learned 

John F. Elder, Chief Scientist, Elder Research, Inc.

Text Mining is the “Wild West” of data mining and predictive analytics – the potential for gain is huge, the capability claims are often tall tales, and the “land rush” for leadership is very much a race.

In solving unstructured (text) analysis challenges, we found that principles from inductive modeling – learning relationships from labeled cases – has great power to enhance text mining. Dr. Elder highlights key technical breakthroughs discovered while working on projects for leading government agencies, including: Text Mining is the “Wild West” of data mining and predictive analytics – the potential for gain is huge, the capability claims are often tall tales, and the “land rush” for leadership is very much a race.

– Prioritizing searches for the Dept. of Homeland Security

– Quick decisions for Social Security Admin. disability

– Document discovery for the Dept. of Defense

– Disease discovery for the Dept. of Homeland Security

– Risk profiling for the Dept. of Defense

Length – 48:58 | Email to a Colleague

Price: $195

 

 

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Play video of session: Keynote: How Target Gets the Most out of Its Guest Data to Improve Marketing ROI
Keynote: How Target Gets the Most out of Its Guest Data to Improve Marketing ROI 

Andrew Pole, Senior Manager, Media and Database Marketing, Target

In this session, you’ll learn how Target leverages its own internal guest data to optimize its direct marketing – with the ultimate goal of enhancing our guests’ shopping experience and driving in-store and online performance. You will hear about what guest data is available at Target, how and where we collect it, and how it is used to improve the performance and relevance of direct marketing vehicles. Furthermore, we will discuss Target’s development and usage of guest segmentation, response modeling, and optimization as means to suppress poor performers from mailings, determine relevant product categories and services for online targeted content, and optimally assign receipt marketing offers to our guests when offer quantities are limited.

Length – 47:49 | Email to a Colleague

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Play video of session: Platinum Sponsor Presentation: Driving Analytics Into Decision Making
Platinum Sponsor Presentation: Driving Analytics Into Decision Making  

Jason Verlen, Director, SPSS Product Strategy & Management, IBM Software Group

Organizations looking to dramatically improve their business outcomes are turning to decision management, a convergence of technology and business processes that is used to streamline and predict the outcome of daily decision-making. IBM SPSS Decision Management technology provides the critical link between analytical insight and recommended actions. In this session you’ll learn how Decision Management software integrates analytics with business rules and business applications for front-line systems such as call center applications, insurance claim processing, and websites. See how you can improve every customer interaction, minimize operational risk, reduce fraud and optimize results.

Length – 17:29 | Email to a Colleague

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TOPIC: DATA INFRASTRUCTURE AND INTEGRATION
Case Study: Macy’s
The world is not flat (even though modeling software has to think it is) 

Paul Coleman, Director of Marketing Statistics, Macy’s Inc.

Software for statistical modeling generally use flat files, where each record represents a unique case with all its variables. In contrast most large databases are relational, where data are distributed among various normalized tables for efficient storage. Variable creation and model scoring engines are necessary to bridge data mining and storage needs. Development datasets taken from a sampled history require snapshot management. Scoring datasets are taken from the present timeframe and the entire available universe. Organizations, with significant data, must decide when to store or calculate necessary data and understand the consequences for their modeling program.

Length – 34:54 | Email to a Colleague

Price: $195

 

 

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TOPIC: CUSTOMER VALUE
Case Study: SunTrust
When One Model Will Not Solve the Problem – Using Multiple Models to Create One Solution 

Dudley Gwaltney, Group Vice President, Analytical Modeling, SunTrust Bank

In 2007, SunTrust Bank developed a series of models to identify clients likely to have large changes in deposit balances. The models include three basic binary and two linear regression models.

Based on the models, 15% of SunTrust clients were targeted as those most likely to have large balance changes. These clients accounted for 65% of the absolute balance change and 60% of the large balance change clients. The targeted clients are grouped into a portfolio and assigned to individual SunTrust Retail Branch. Since 2008, the portfolio generated a 2.6% increase in balances over control.

Using the SunTrust example, this presentation will focus on:

– Identifying situations requiring multiple models

– Determining what types of models are needed

– Combining the individual component models into one output

Length – 48:22 | Email to a Colleague

Price: $195

 

 

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TOPIC: RESPONSE & CROSS-SELL
Case Study: Paychex
Staying One Step Ahead of the Competition – Development of a Predictive 401(k) Marketing and Sales Campaign 

Jason Fox, Information Systems and Portfolio Manager,Paychex

In-depth case study of Paychex, Inc. utilizing predictive modeling to turn the tides on competitive pressures within their own client base. Paychex, a leading provider of payroll and human resource solutions, will guide you through the development of a Predictive 401(k) Marketing and Sales model. Through the use of sophisticated data mining techniques and regression analysis the model derives the probability a client will add retirement services products with Paychex or with a competitor. Session will include roadblocks that could have ended development and ROI analysis. Speaker: Frank Fiorille, Director of Enterprise Risk Management, Paychex Speaker: Jason Fox, Risk Management Analyst, Paychex

Length – 26:29 | Email to a Colleague

Price: $195

 

 

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TOPIC: SEGMENTATION
Practitioner: Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce
Segmentation Do’s and Don’ts 

Daymond Ling, Senior Director, Modelling & Analytics,Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce

The concept of Segmentation is well accepted in business and has withstood the test of time. Even with the advent of new artificial intelligence and machine learning methods, this old war horse still has its place and is alive and well. Like all analytical methods, when used correctly it can lead to enhanced market positioning and competitive advantage, while improper application can have severe negative consequences.

This session will explore what are the elements of success, and what are the worse practices that lead to failure. The relationship between segmentation and predictive modeling will also be discussed to clarify when it is appropriate to use one versus the other, and how to use them together synergistically.

Length – 45:57 | Email to a Colleague

Price: $195

 

 

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TOPIC: SOCIAL DATA
Thought Leadership
Social Network Analysis: Killer Application for Cloud Analytics 

James Kobielus, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research

Social networks such as Twitter and Facebook are a potential goldmine of insights on what is truly going through customers´minds. Every company wants to know whether, how, how often, and by whom they´re being mentioned across the billowing new cloud of social media. Just as important, every company wants to influence those discussions in their favor, target new business, and harvest maximum revenue potential. In this session, Forrester analyst James Kobielus identifies fruitful applications of social network analysis in customer service, sales, marketing, and brand management. He presents a roadmap for enterprises to leverage their inline analytics initiatives and leverage high-performance data warehousing (DW) clouds and appliances in order to analyze shifting patterns of customer sentiment, influence, and propensity. Leveraging Forrester’s ongoing research in advanced analytics and customer relationship management, Kobielus will discuss industry trends, commercial modeling tools, and emerging best practices in social network analysis, which represents a game-changing new discipline in predictive analytics.

Length – 48:16 | Email to a Colleague

Price: $195

 

 

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TOPIC: HEALTHCARE – INTERNATIONAL TARGETING
Case Study: Life Line Screening
Taking CRM Global Through Predictive Analytics 

Ozgur Dogan,
VP, Quantitative Solutions Group, Merkle Inc

Trish Mathe,
Director of Database Marketing, Life Line Screening

While Life Line is successfully executing a US CRM roadmap, they are also beginning this same evolution abroad. They are beginning in the UK where Merkle procured data and built a response model that is pulling responses over 30% higher than competitors. This presentation will give an overview of the US CRM roadmap, and then focus on the beginning of their strategy abroad, focusing on the data procurement they could not get anywhere else but through Merkle and the successful modeling and analytics for the UK. Speaker: Ozgur Dogan, VP, Quantitative Solutions Group, Merkle Inc Speaker: Trish Mathe, Director of Database Marketing, Life Line Screening

Length – 40:12 | Email to a Colleague

Price: $195

 

 

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TOPIC: SURVEY ANALYSIS
Case Study: Forrester
Making Survey Insights Addressable and Scalable – The Case Study of Forrester’s Technographics Benchmark Survey 

Nethra Sambamoorthi, Team Leader, Consumer Dynamics & Analytics, Global Consulting, Acxiom Corporation

Marketers use surveys to create enterprise wide applicable strategic insights to: (1) develop segmentation schemes, (2) summarize consumer behaviors and attitudes for the whole US population, and (3) use multiple surveys to draw unified views about their target audience. However, these insights are not directly addressable and scalable to the whole consumer universe which is very important when applying the power of survey intelligence to the one to one consumer marketing problems marketers routinely face. Acxiom partnered with Forrester Research, creating addressable and scalable applications of Forrester’s Technographics Survey and applied it successfully to a number of industries and applications.

Length – 39:23 | Email to a Colleague

Price: $195

 

 

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TOPIC: HEALTHCARE
Case Study: UPMC Health Plan
A Predictive Model for Hospital Readmissions 

Scott Zasadil, Senior Scientist, UPMC Health Plan

Hospital readmissions are a significant component of our nation’s healthcare costs. Predicting who is likely to be readmitted is a challenging problem. Using a set of 123,951 hospital discharges spanning nearly three years, we developed a model that predicts an individual’s 30-day readmission should they incur a hospital admission. The model uses an ensemble of boosted decision trees and prior medical claims and captures 64% of all 30-day readmits with a true positive rate of over 27%. Moreover, many of the ‘false’ positives are simply delayed true positives. 53% of the predicted 30-day readmissions are readmitted within 180 days.

Length – 54:18 | Email to a Colleague

Price: $195
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