The Year 2010

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My annual traffic to this blog was almost 99,000 . Add in additional views on networking sites plus the 400 plus RSS readers- so I can say traffic was 1,20,000 for 2010. Nice. Thanks for reading and hope it was worth your time. (this is a long post and will take almost 440 secs to read but the summary is just given)

My intent is either to inform you, give something useful or atleast something interesting.

see below-

Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun
2010 6,311 4,701 4,922 5,463 6,493 4,271
Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Total
5,041 5,403 17,913 16,430 11,723 10,096 98,767

 

 

Sandro Saita from http://www.dataminingblog.com/ just named me for an award on his blog (but my surname is ohRi , Sandro left me without an R- What would I be without R :)) ).

Aw! I am touched. Google for “Data Mining Blog” and Sandro is the best that it is in data mining writing.

DMR People Award 2010
There are a lot of active people in the field of data mining. You can discuss with them on forums. You can read their blogs. You can also meet them in events such as PAW or KDD. Among the people I follow on a regular basis, I have elected:

Ajay Ori

He has been very active in 2010, especially on his blog . Good work Ajay and continue sharing your experience with us!”

What did I write in 2010- stuff.

What did you read on this blog- well thats the top posts list.

2009-12-31 to Today

Title Views
Home page More stats 21,150
Top 10 Graphical User Interfaces in Statistical Software More stats 6,237
Wealth = function (numeracy, memory recall) More stats 2,014
Matlab-Mathematica-R and GPU Computing More stats 1,946
The Top Statistical Softwares (GUI) More stats 1,405
About DecisionStats More stats 1,352
Using Facebook Analytics (Updated) More stats 1,313
Test drive a Chrome notebook. More stats 1,170
Top ten RRReasons R is bad for you ? More stats 1,157
Libre Office More stats 1,151
Interview Hadley Wickham R Project Data Visualization Guru More stats 1,007
Using Red R- R with a Visual Interface More stats 854
SAS Institute files first lawsuit against WPS- Episode 1 More stats 790
Interview Professor John Fox Creator R Commander More stats 764
R Package Creating More stats 754
Windows Azure vs Amazon EC2 (and Google Storage) More stats 726
Norman Nie: R GUI and More More stats 716
Startups for Geeks More stats 682
Google Maps – Jet Ski across Pacific Ocean More stats 670
Not so AWkward after all: R GUI RKWard More stats 579
Red R 1.8- Pretty GUI More stats 570
Parallel Programming using R in Windows More stats 569
R is an epic fail or is it just overhyped More stats 559
Enterprise Linux rises rapidly:New Report More stats 537
Rapid Miner- R Extension More stats 518
Creating a Blog Aggregator for free More stats 504
So which software is the best analytical software? Sigh- It depends More stats 473
Revolution R for Linux More stats 465
John Sall sets JMP 9 free to tango with R More stats 460

So how do people come here –

well I guess I owe Tal G for almost 9000 views ( incidentally I withdrew posting my blog from R- Bloggers and Analyticbridge blogs – due to SEO keyword reasons and some spam I was getting see (below))

http://r-bloggers.com is still the CAT’s whiskers and I read it  a lot.

I still dont know who linked my blog to a free sex movie site with 400 views but I have a few suspects.

2009-12-31 to Today

Referrer Views
r-bloggers.com 9,131
Reddit 3,829
rattle.togaware.com 1,500
Twitter 1,254
Google Reader 1,215
linkedin.com 717
freesexmovie.irwanaf.com 422
analyticbridge.com 341
Google 327
coolavenues.com 322
Facebook 317
kdnuggets.com 298
dataminingblog.com 278
en.wordpress.com 185
google.co.in 151
xianblog.wordpress.com 130
inside-r.org 124
decisionstats.com 119
ifreestores.com 117
bits.blogs.nytimes.com 108

Still reading this post- gosh let me sell you some advertising. It is only $100 a month (yes its a recession)

Advertisers are treated on First in -Last out (FILO)

I have been told I am obsessed with SEO , but I dont care much for search engines apart from Google, and yes SEO is an interesting science (they should really re name it GEO or Google Engine Optimization)

Apparently Hadley Wickham and Donald Farmer are big keywords for me so I should be more respectful I guess.

Search Terms for 365 days ending 2010-12-31 (Summarized)

2009-12-31 to Today

Search Views
libre office 925
facebook analytics 798
test drive a chrome notebook 467
test drive a chrome notebook. 215
r gui 203
data mining 163
wps sas lawsuit 158
wordle.net 133
wps sas 123
google maps jet ski 123
test drive chrome notebook 96
sas wps 89
sas wps lawsuit 85
chrome notebook test drive 83
decision stats 83
best statistics software 74
hadley wickham 72
google maps jetski 72
libreoffice 70
doug savage 65
hive tutorial 58
funny india 56
spss certification 52
donald farmer microsoft 51
best statistical software 49

What about outgoing links? Apparently I need to find a way to ask Google to pay me for the free advertising I gave their chrome notebook launch. But since their search engine and browser is free to me, guess we are even steven.

Clicks for 365 days ending 2010-12-31 (Summarized)

2009-12-31 to Today

URL Clicks
rattle.togaware.com 378
facebook.com/Decisionstats 355
rapid-i.com/content/view/182/196 319
services.google.com/fb/forms/cr48basic 313
red-r.org 228
decisionstats.wordpress.com/2010/05/07/the-top-statistical-softwares-gui 199
teamwpc.co.uk/products/wps 162
r4stats.com/popularity 148
r-statistics.com/2010/04/r-and-the-google-summer-of-code-2010-accepted-students-and-projects 138
socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox/Misc/Rcmdr 138
spss.com/certification 116
learnr.wordpress.com 114
dudeofdata.com/decisionstats 108
r-project.org 107
documentfoundation.org/faq 104
goo.gl/maps/UISY 100
inside-r.org/download 96
en.wikibooks.org/wiki/R_Programming 92
nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2010/12/07/07readwriteweb-report-google-offering-chrome-notebook-test-11919.html 92
sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/rkward/index.php?title=Main_Page 92
analyticdroid.togaware.com 88
yeroon.net/ggplot2 87

so in 2010,

SAS remained top daddy in business analytics,

R made revolutionary strides in terms of new packages,

JMP  launched a new version,

SPSS got integrated with Cognos,

Oracle sued Google and did build a great Data Mining GUI,

Libre Office gave you a non Oracle Open office ( or open even more office)

2011 looks like  a fun year. Have safe partying .

PAWCON Bay Area March

The biggest Predictive Analytics Conference comes back to the SF Bay in March next year.

From

http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/sanfrancisco/2011/

Predictive Analytics World March 2011 in San Francisco is packed with the top predictive analytics experts, practitioners, authors and business thought leaders, including keynote speakers:


Sugato Basu, Ph.D.
Senior Research Scientist
Google
Lessons Learned in Predictive Modeling 
for Ad Targeting

Eric Siegel, Ph.D.
Conference Chair
Predictive Analytics World
Five Ways Predictive Analytics
Cuts Enterprise Risk




Plus special plenary sessions from industry heavy-weights:


Andreas S. Weigend, Ph.D.
weigend.com
Former Chief Scientist, Amazon.com
The State of the Social Data Revoltion

John F. Elder, Ph.D.
CEO and Founder
Elder Research
Data Mining Lessons Learned




Predictive Analytics World focuses on concrete examples of deployed predictive analytics. Hear from the horse’s mouth precisely how Fortune 500 analytics competitors and other top practitioners deploy predictive modeling, and what kind of business impact it delivers. Click here to view the agenda at-a-glance.

PAW SF 2011 will feature speakers with case studies from leading enterprises. such as:

PAW’s March agenda covers hot topics and advanced methods such as uplift (net lift) modeling, ensemble models, social data, search marketing, crowdsourcing, blackbox trading, fraud detection, risk management, survey analysis and otherinnovative applications that benefit organizations in new and creative ways.

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

 

Interview John F Moore CEO The Lab

Social Media Landscape

Here is an interview with John F Moore, social media adviser,technologist and founder and CEO of The Lab.

Ajay-  The internet seems to be crowded by social media experts with everyone who spends a lot of time on the internet claiming to be one? How  does a small business owner on a budget distinguish for the correct value proposition that social media can give them. 

John- You’re right.  It seems like everytime I turn around I bump into more social media “experts”.  The majority of these self-proclaimed experts are not adding a great deal of value.  When looking to spend money for help ask the person a few questions about their approach. Things you should be hearing include:

  • The expert should be seeking to fully understand your business, your goals, your available resources, etc..
  • The expert should be seeking to understand current management thinking about social media and related technologies.

If the expert is purely focused on tools they are the wrong person.  Your solution may require tools alone but they cannot know this without first understanding your business.

Ajay- Facebook has 600 million people, with people preferring to play games and connect to old acquaintances rather than use social media for tangible career or business benefit..

John- People are definitely spending time playing games, looking at photos, and catching up with old friends.  However, there are many businesses seeing real value from Facebook (primarily by tying it into their e-mail marketing and using coupons and other incentives).  For example, I recently shared a small case study (http://thejohnfmoore.com/2010/10/07/email-social-media-and-coupons-makes-the-cfo-smile/) where a small pet product company achieved a 22% bump in monthly revenue by combining Facebook and coupons together.  In fact,45% of this bump in revenue came from new clients.  Customer acquisition and increased revenue were accomplished by using Facebook for their business.
Ajay-  How does a new social media convert (individual) go on selecting communities to join (Facebook,Twitter,Linkedin,Ning, Ping,Orkut, Empire Avenue etc etc.
How does a small business owner take the same decision.

John- It always starts with taking the time to define your goals and then determine how much time and effort you are willing to invest.  For example:
  • LinkedIn. A must have for individuals as it is one of the key social networking communities for professional networking.  Individuals should join groups that are relevant to their career and invest an hour a week.  Businesses should ensure they have a business profile completed and up to date.
  • Facebook can be a challenge for anyone trying to walk the personal/professional line.  However, from a business standpoint you should be creating a Facebook page that you can use to compliment your other marketing channels.
  • Twitter.  It is a great network to learn of, to meet, and to interact with people from around the world.  I have met thousands of interesting people, many of which I have had the pleasure to meet with in real life.  Businesses need to invest in listening on twitter to determine if their customers (current or potential) or competitors are already there discussing them, their marketplace, or their offerings.
In all cases I would encourage businesses to setup social media accounts on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr.  You want to ensure your brand is protected by owning these accounts and ensuring at least the base information is accurate.
Ajay- Name the top 5 points that you think make a social media community successful.  What are the top 5 points for a business to succeed in their social media strategy.

John-
  • Define your goals up front.  Understand why you are building a community and keep this goal in mind.
  • Provide education.  Ideally you want to become a thought leader in your space, the trusted resource that people can turn to even if they are not using your product or services today.
  • Be honest.  We all make mistakes.  When you do, be honest with your community and engage them in any fall-out that may be coming out of your mistake.
  • Listen to them.  Use platforms like BubbleIdeas to gather feedback on what your community is looking for from the relationship.
  • Measure.  Are you on track with your goals?  Do your goals need to change?
Ajay- What is the unique value proposition that “The Lab” offers

John- The Lab understands the strategic importance of leveraging social media, management and leadership best practices, and our understanding of local government and small and medium business to help people in these areas achieve their goals.  Too many consultants come to the table with a predefined solution that really misses the mark as it lacks understanding of the client’s goals.
Ajay-  What is “CityCamp in Boston” all about.

John- CityCamp is a FREE unconference focused on innovation for municipal governments and community organizations (http://www.citycampboston.org/what-is-citycamp-boston/).  It brings together politicians, local municipal employees, citizens, vendors, developers, and journalist to build a common understanding of local government challenges and then works to deliver measurable outcomes following the event.  The key is the focus on change management, driving change as opposed to just in the moment education.
Biography-

John F Moore is the Founder and CEO of The Lab (http://thelabinboston.com).  John has experience working with local governments and small and medium business owners to achieve their goals.  His experience with social media strategies, CRM, and a plethora of other solutions provides immense value to all of our clients.   He has built engineering organizations, learned sales and marketing, run customer service teams, and built and executed strategies for social media thought leadership and branding.  He is also a prolific blogger as you can see by checking out his blog at http://thejohnfmoore.com.

Clustering Business Analysts and Industry Analysts

In my interactions with the world at large (mostly online) in the ways of data, statistics and analytics- I come across people who like to call themselves analysts.

As per me, there are 4 kinds of analysts principally,

1) Corporate Analysts- They work for a particular software company. As per them their product is great and infallible, their code has no bugs, and last zillion customer case studies all got a big benefit by buying their software.

They are very good at writing software code themselves, unfortunately this expertise is restricted to Microsoft Outlook (emails) and MS Powerpoint ( presentations). No they are more like salesmen than analysts, but as Arthur Miller said ” All salesmen (person) are dreamers. When the dream dies, the salesman (person) dies (read transfers to bigger job at a rival company)

2) Third -Party Independent Analsyst- The main reason they are third party is they can not be tolerated in a normal corporate culture, their spouse can barely stand them for more than 2 hours a day, and their Intelligence is not matched by their emotional maturity. Alas, after turning independent analysts, they realize they are actually more dependent to people than before, and they quickly polish their behaviour to praise who ever is sponsoring their webinar,  white paper , newsletter, or flying them to junkets. They are more of boutique consultants, but they used to be quite nifty at writing code, when younger, so they call themselves independent and “Noted Industry Analyst”

3) Researcher Analysts- They mostly scrape info from press releases which are mostly written by a hapless overworked communications team thrown at a task at last moment. They get into one hour call with who ever is the press or industry/analyst  relations honcho is- turn the press release into bullet points, and publish on the blog. They call this as research Analysts and give it away for free (but actually couldnt get anyone to pay for it for last 4 years). Couldnt write code if their life depended on it, but usually will find transformation and expert somehwere in their resume/about me web page. May have co -authored a book, which would have gotten them a F for plagiarism had they submitted it as a thesis.

4) Analytical Analysts- They are mostly buried deep within organizational bureaucracies if corporate, or within partnerships if they are independent. Understand coding, innovation (or creativity). Not very aggressive at networking unless provoked by an absolute idiot belonging to first three classes of industry analyst. Prefer to read Atlas Shrugged than argue on business semantics.

Next time you see an industry expert- you know which cluster to classify them 😉

Image Citation-

http://gapingvoidgallery.com/

More PAWS

Dr Eric Siegel  (interviewed here at https://decisionstats.wordpress.com/2009/07/14/interview_eric-siege/ )

continues his series of excellent analytical conferences-

Oct 19-20 – WASHINGTON DC: PAW Conference & Workshops (pawcon.com/dc)

Oct 28-29 – SAN FRANCISCO: Workshop (businessprediction.com)

Nov 15-16 – LONDON: PAW Conference & Workshop (pawcon.com/london)

March 14-15, 2011 – SAN FRANCISCO: PAW Conference & Workshops

* Register by Sep 30 for PAW London Early-Bird – Save £200
http://pawcon.com/london/register.php

* For the Oct 28-29 workshop, see http://businessprediction.com

———————–

INFORMATION ABOUT THE PAW CONFERENCES:

Predictive Analytics World ( http://pawcon.com ) is the business-focused event for predictive analytics professionals, managers and commercial practitioners, covering today’s commercial deployment of predictive analytics, across industries and across software vendors.

PAW delivers the best case studies, expertise, keynotes, sessions, workshops, exposition, expert panel, live demos, networking coffee breaks, reception, birds-of-a-feather lunches, brand-name enterprise leaders, and industry heavyweights in the business.

Case study presentations cover campaign targeting, churn modeling, next-best-offer, selecting marketing channels, global analytics deployment, email marketing, HR candidate search, and other innovative applications. The Conference agendas cover hot topics such as social data, text mining, search marketing, risk management, uplift (incremental lift) modeling, survey analysis, consumer privacy, sales force optimization and other innovative applications that benefit organizations in new and creative ways.

PAW delivers two rich conference programs in Oct./Nov. with very little content overlap featuring a wealth of speakers with front-line experience. See which one is best for you:

PAW’s DC 2010 (Oct 19-20) program includes over 25 sessions across two tracks – an “All Audiences” and an “Expert/Practitioner” track — so you can witness how predictive analytics is applied at 1-800-FLOWERS, CIBC, Corporate Executive Board, Forrester, LifeLine, Macy’s, MetLife, Miles Kimball, Monster, Paychex, PayPal (eBay), SunTrust, Target, UPMC Health Plan, Xerox, YMCA, and Yahoo!, plus special examples from the U.S. government agencies DoD, DHS, and SSA.

Sign up for event updates in the US http://pawcon.com/signup-us.php
View the agenda at-a-glance: http://pawcon.com/dc/2010/agenda_overview.php
For more: http://pawcon.com/dc
Register: http://pawcon.com/dc/register.php

PAW London 2010 (Nov 15-16) will feature over 20 speakers from 10 countries with case studies from leading enterprises in e-commerce, finance, healthcare, retail, and telecom such as Canadian Automobile Association, Chessmetrics, e-Dialog, Hamburger Sparkasse, Jeevansathi.com (India’s 2nd-largest matrimony portal), Life Line Screening, Lloyds TSB, Naukri.com (India’s number 1 job portal), Overtoom, SABMiller, Univ. of Melbourne, and US Bank, plus special examples from Anheuser-Busch, Disney, HP, HSBC, Pfizer, U.S. SSA, WestWind Foundation and others.

Sign up for event updates in the UK http://pawcon.com/signup-uk.php
View the agenda at-a-glance: http://pawcon.com/london/2010/agenda_overview.php
For more: http://pawcon.com/london
Register: http://pawcon.com/london/register.php

——————————-

PAW San Francisco Save-the-Date and Call-for-Speakers:

March 14-15, 2011
San Francisco Marriott Marquis
San Francisco, CA

PAW call-for-speakers information and submission form: (Due Oct 8)
http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/submit.php

If you wish to receive periodic call-for-speakers notifications regarding Predictive Analytics World, email chair@predictiveanalyticsworld.com with the subject line “call-for-speakers notifications”.

Predictive Analytics World
http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com
Washington DC – London – San Francisco

Event: Predictive analytics with R, PMML and ADAPA

From http://www.meetup.com/R-Users/calendar/14405407/

The September meeting is at the Oracle campus. (This is next door to the Oracle towers, so there is plenty of free parking.) The featured talk is from Alex Guazzelli (Vice President – Analytics, Zementis Inc.) who will talk about “Predictive analytics with R, PMML and ADAPA”.

Agenda:
* 6:15 – 7:00 Networking and Pizza (with thanks to Revolution Analytics)
* 7:00 – 8:00 Talk: Predictive analytics with R, PMML and ADAPA
* 8:00 – 8:30 General discussion

Talk overview:

The rule in the past was that whenever a model was built in a particular development environment, it remained in that environment forever, unless it was manually recoded to work somewhere else. This rule has been shattered with the advent of PMML (Predictive Modeling Markup Language). By providing a uniform standard to represent predictive models, PMML allows for the exchange of predictive solutions between different applications and various vendors.

Once exported as PMML files, models are readily available for deployment into an execution engine for scoring or classification. ADAPA is one example of such an engine. It takes in models expressed in PMML and transforms them into web-services. Models can be executed either remotely by using web-services calls, or via a web console. Users can also use an Excel add-in to score data from inside Excel using models built in R.

R models have been exported into PMML and uploaded in ADAPA for many different purposes. Use cases where clients have used the flexibility of R to develop and the PMML standard combined with ADAPA to deploy range from financial applications (e.g., risk, compliance, fraud) to energy applications for the smart grid. The ability to easily transition solutions developed in R to the operational IT production environment helps eliminate the traditional limitations of R, e.g. performance for high volume or real-time transactional systems and memory constraints associated with large data sets.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Alex Guazzelli has co-authored the first book on PMML, the Predictive Model Markup Language which is the de facto standard used to represent predictive models. The book, entitled PMML in Action: Unleashing the Power of Open Standards for Data Mining and Predictive Analytics, is available on Amazon.com. As the Vice President of Analytics at Zementis, Inc., Dr. Guazzelli is responsible for developing core technology and analytical solutions under ADAPA, a PMML-based predictive decisioning platform that combines predictive analytics and business rules. ADAPA is the first system of its kind to be offered as a service on the cloud.
Prior to joining Zementis, Dr. Guazzelli was involved in not only building but also deploying predictive solutions for large financial and telecommunication institutions around the globe. In academia, Dr. Guazzelli worked with data mining, neural networks, expert systems and brain theory. His work in brain theory and computational neuroscience has appeared in many peer reviewed publications. At Zementis, Dr. Guazzelli and his team have been involved in a myriad of modeling projects for financial, health-care, gaming, chemical, and manufacturing industries.

Dr. Guazzelli holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California and a M.S and B.S. in Computer Science from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.

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