peter dalgaard – DECISION STATS

R RANT- while the European R Core leadership led by the Great Dane, Pierre Dalgaard focuses on the small picture and virtually handing the whole commercial side to Prof Nie and David Smith at Revo Computing other smaller package developers have refused to be treated as cheap R and D developers for enterprise software. How’s the book sales coming along, Prof Peter? Any plans to write another R Book or are you done with writing your version of Mathematica (Ref-Newton). Running the R Core project team must be so hard I recommend the Tarantino movie “Inglorious B…” for Herr Doktors. -END

I believe that individual R Package creators like Prof Harell (Hmisc) , or Hadley Wickham (plyr) deserve a share of the royalties or REVENUE that Revolution Computing, or ANY software company that uses R.

On this note-Some updated news on Rattle the Data Mining Tool created by Dr Graham Williams. Once again R development taken ahead by Down Under chaps while the Big Guys thrash out the road map across the Pond.

Data Mining Resources

Citation –http://datamining.togaware.com/

Rattle is a free and open source data mining toolkit written in the statistical language R using the Gnome graphical interface. It runs under GNU/Linux, Macintosh OS X, and MS/Windows. Rattle is being used in business, government, research and for teaching data mining in Australia and internationally. Rattle can be purchased on DVD (or made available as a downloadable CD image) as a standalone installation for $450USD ($560AUD), using one of the following payment buttons.

The free and open source book, The Data Mining Desktop Survival Guide (ISBN 0-9757109-2-3) simply explains the otherwise complex algorithms and concepts of data mining, with examples to illustrate each algorithm using the statistical language R. The book is being written by Dr Graham Williams, based on his 20 years research and consulting experience in machine learning and data mining. An electronic PDF version is available for a small fee from Togaware ($40AUD/$35USD to cover costs and ongoing development);

Other Resources

The Data Mining Software Repository makes available a collection of free (as in libre) open source software tools for data mining

The Data Mining Catalogue lists many of the free and commercial data mining tools that are available on the market.

The Australasian Data Mining Conferences are supported by Togaware, which also hosts the web site.

Information about the Pacific Asia Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining series of conferences is also available.

A Data Mining course is taught at the Australian National University.

See also the Canberra Analytics Practise Group.

A Data Mining Course was held at the Harbin Institute of Technology Shenzhen Graduate School, China, 6 December – 13 December 2006. This course introduced the basic concepts and algorithms of data mining from an applications point of view and introduced the use of R and Rattle for data mining in practise.

A Data Mining Workshop was held over two days at the University of Canberra, 27-28 November, 2006. This course introduced the basic concepts and algorithms for data mining and the use of R and Rattle.

Using R for Data Mining

The open source statistical programming language R (based on S) is in daily use in academia and in business and government. We use R for data mining within the Australian Taxation Office. Rattle is used by those wishing to interact with R through a GUI.

R is memory based so that on 32bit CPUs you are limited to smaller datasets (perhaps 50,000 up to 100,000, depending on what you are doing). Deploying R on 64bit multiple CPU (AMD64) servers running GNU/Linux with 32GB of main memory provides a powerful platform for data mining.

R is open source, thus providing assurance that there will always be the opportunity to fix and tune things that suit our specific needs, rather than rely on having to convince a vendor to fix or tune their product to suit our needs.

Also, by being open source, we can be sure that the code will always be available, unlike some of the data mining products that have disappearded (e.g., IBM’s Intelligent Miner).