You can go to https://code.google.com/apis/console/b/0/
Unlike Android and other free stuff these APIs are very promising for revenue generation as some of them are very unique to Google itself, and already some are being offered on a Pricing Tier. There are 18 APIs in total with 3 APIs having Pricing while the rest are in beta stages.
I am just listing down all the APIs in one place – Continue reading “Google APIs”
To join the preview group, go to the APIs Console and click the Prediction API slider to “ON,” and then sign up for a Google Storage account.
For the past several months, I have been member of a semi-public beta test/group/forum – that is headed by Travis Green of the Google Prediction API Team (not the hockey player). Basically in helping the Google guys more feedback on the feature list for model building via cloud computing. I couldn’t talk about it much , because it was all NDA hush hush.
Anyways- as of today the version 1.2 of Google Prediction API has been launched. What does this do to the ordinary Joe Modeler? Well it helps gives your models -thats right your plain vanilla logistic regression,arima, arimax, models an added ensemble option of using Google’s Machine Learning Continue reading “Google releases V1.2 of Google Prediction API”
A workshop on using R for Predictive Modeling, by the Director, Non Clinical Stats, Pfizer. Interesting Bay Area Event- part of next edition of Predictive Analytics World
Intended Audience: Practitioners who wish to learn how to execute on predictive analytics by way of the R language; anyone who wants “to turn ideas into software, quickly and faithfully.”
Knowledge Level: Either hands-on experience with predictive modeling (without R) or hands-on familiarity with any programming language (other than R) is sufficient background and preparation to participate in this workshop.
This one-day session provides a hands-on introduction to R, the well-known open-source platform for data analysis. Real examples are employed in order to methodically expose attendees to best practices driving R and its rich set of predictive modeling packages, providing hands-on experience and know-how. R is compared to other data analysis platforms, and common pitfalls in using R are addressed.
The instructor, a leading R developer and the creator of CARET, a core R package that streamlines the process for creating predictive models, will guide attendees on hands-on execution with R, covering:
Hardware: Bring Your Own Laptop
Each workshop participant is required to bring their own laptop running Windows or OS X. The software used during this training program, R, is free and readily available for download.
Attendees receive an electronic copy of the course materials and related R code at the conclusion of the workshop.
Max Kuhn is a Director of Nonclinical Statistics at Pfizer Global R&D in Connecticut. He has been apply models in the pharmaceutical industries for over 15 years.
He is a leading R developer and the author of several R packages including the CARET package that provides a simple and consistent interface to over 100 predictive models available in R.
Mr. Kuhn has taught courses on modeling within Pfizer and externally, including a class for the India Ministry of Information Technology.
http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/sanfrancisco/2011/r_for_predictive_modeling.php
So I saw the news at NY R Meetup and decided to have a go at Prediction API Package (which first started off as a blog post at
http://onertipaday.blogspot.com/2010/11/r-wrapper-for-google-prediction-api.html
1)My OS was Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook
Ubuntu has a slight glitch plus workaround for installing the RCurl package on which the Google Prediction API is dependent- you need to first install this Ubuntu package for RCurl to install libcurl4-gnutls-dev
Once you install that using Synaptic,
Simply start R
2) Install Packages rjson and Rcurl using install.packages and choosing CRAN
Since GooglePredictionAPI is not yet on CRAN
,
3) Download that package from
You need to copy this downloaded package to your “first library ” folder
When you start R, simply run
.libPaths()[1]
and thats the folder you copy the GooglePredictionAPI package you downloaded.
5) Now the following line works
> install.packages("googlepredictionapi_0.1.tar.gz", repos=NULL, type="source")
6) Uploading data to Google Storage using the GUI (rather than gs util)
Just go to https://sandbox.google.com/storage/
and thats the Google Storage manager
Notes on Training Data-
Use a csv file
The first column is the score column (like 1,0 or prediction score)
There are no headers- so delete headers from data file and move the dependent variable to the first column (Note I used data from the kaggle contest for R package recommendation at
http://kaggle.com/R?viewtype=data )
6) The good stuff:
Once you type in the basic syntax, the first time it will ask for your Google Credentials (email and password)
It then starts showing you time elapsed for training.
Now you can disconnect and go off (actually I got disconnected by accident before coming back in a say 5 minutes so this is the part where I think this is what happened is why it happened, dont blame me, test it for yourself) –
and when you come back (hopefully before token expires) you can see status of your request (see below)
> library(rjson) > library(RCurl) Loading required package: bitops > library(googlepredictionapi) > my.model <- PredictionApiTrain(data="gs://numtraindata/training_data") The request for training has sent, now trying to check if training is completed Training on numtraindata/training_data: time:2.09 seconds Training on numtraindata/training_data: time:7.00 seconds
7)
Note I changed the format from the URL where my data is located- simply go to your Google Storage Manager and right click on the file name for link address ( https://sandbox.google.com/storage/numtraindata/training_data.csv)
to gs://numtraindata/training_data (that kind of helps in any syntax error)
8) From the kind of high level instructions at https://code.google.com/p/google-prediction-api-r-client/, you could also try this on a local file
## Load googlepredictionapi and dependent libraries library(rjson) library(RCurl) library(googlepredictionapi) ## Make a training call to the Prediction API against data in the Google Storage. ## Replace MYBUCKET and MYDATA with your data. my.model <- PredictionApiTrain(data="gs://MYBUCKET/MYDATA") ## Alternatively, make a training call against training data stored locally as a CSV file. ## Replace MYPATH and MYFILE with your data. my.model <- PredictionApiTrain(data="MYPATH/MYFILE.csv")
At the time of writing my data was still getting trained, so I will keep you posted on what happens.
The new Google Ad Planner is really nice-seems better than old Adwords interface, though needs a UI redesign before it can complete with the clean cut slice and dice of Facebook Ad Planner.
It’s the interface, stupid that makes an Iphone sell more than the Symbian even with 90% functionality. Same reasons why Google Storage is okay but Google Prediction API gets slower liftoff than Amazon Console (now with FREE instances) – though the R interface to Prediction API sure helps.
Prediction API is a terrific tool dying for oxygen out there (and will end up like Wave- I hope not)
Sometimes you need artists as well as engineers to design query tools, G Men- and guess the Double Click anti trust rumours have quietened down enough because why the heck did double click interface integration take so loooong.
( and btw why cant Google just get into the multi billion dashboard business if they can manage ALL the data IN THE INTERNET ——they sure can do it for specific companies- – but wait-
they are probably waiting for AsterData to stop sucking thumbs ,chanting on MapReduce SQL, MapReduce SQL nursery rhymes and start inventing NEW STUFF again (or atleast creating two product brands from nCluster (when you and I were in school together giggle)
Btw the time Google make up their mind to enter BI or wait for Aster to finish- IBM would have gulped and burped all there it is- and thats the way that market rolls.
Back to Ad s and Mad Men.
Here are some screenshots-of the new Google Ad Planner-
I found it useful to review traffic for third party websites (even better than Google Trends) and thats a definite plus over Facebooks closed dormitory world of ads.
Click on them for some more views or go straight to http://google.com/adplanner and Enjoy Baby!
Which websites attract your target customers?View a site listing:
 Refine your online advertising with DoubleClick Ad Planner, a free media planning tool that can help you: Identify websites your target customers are likely to visit
Easily build media plans for yourself or your clients
and
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Here is a short list of resources and material I put together as starting points for R and Cloud Computing It’s a bit messy but overall should serve quite comprehensively.
Cloud computing is a commonly used expression to imply a generational change in computing from desktop-servers to remote and massive computing connections,shared computers, enabled by high bandwidth across the internet.
As per the National Institute of Standards and Technology Definition,
Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.
Authors: Peter Mell and Tim Grance
Version 15, 10-7-09
National Institute of Standards and Technology, Information Technology Laboratory
http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/SNS/cloud-computing/cloud-def-v15.doc)
R is an integrated suite of software facilities for data manipulation, calculation and graphical display.
From http://cran.r-project.org/doc/FAQ/R-FAQ.html#R-Web-Interfaces
Rweb is developed and maintained by Jeff Banfield. The Rweb Home Page provides access to all three versions of Rweb—a simple text entry form that returns output and graphs, a more sophisticated JavaScript version that provides a multiple window environment, and a set of point and click modules that are useful for introductory statistics courses and require no knowledge of the R language. All of the Rweb versions can analyze Web accessible datasets if a URL is provided.
The paper “Rweb: Web-based Statistical Analysis”, providing a detailed explanation of the different versions of Rweb and an overview of how Rweb works, was published in the Journal of Statistical Software (http://www.jstatsoft.org/v04/i01/).
Ulf Bartel has developed R-Online, a simple on-line programming environment for R which intends to make the first steps in statistical programming with R (especially with time series) as easy as possible. There is no need for a local installation since the only requirement for the user is a JavaScript capable browser. See http://osvisions.com/r-online/ for more information.
Rcgi is a CGI WWW interface to R by MJ Ray. It had the ability to use “embedded code”: you could mix user input and code, allowing the HTMLauthor to do anything from load in data sets to enter most of the commands for users without writing CGI scripts. Graphical output was possible in PostScript or GIF formats and the executed code was presented to the user for revision. However, it is not clear if the project is still active.
Currently, a modified version of Rcgi by Mai Zhou (actually, two versions: one with (bitmap) graphics and one without) as well as the original code are available from http://www.ms.uky.edu/~statweb/.
CGI-based web access to R is also provided at http://hermes.sdu.dk/cgi-bin/go/. There are many additional examples of web interfaces to R which basically allow to submit R code to a remote server, see for example the collection of links available from http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/twiki/bin/view/Main/StatCompCourse.
David Firth has written CGIwithR, an R add-on package available from CRAN. It provides some simple extensions to R to facilitate running R scripts through the CGI interface to a web server, and allows submission of data using both GET and POST methods. It is easily installed using Apache under Linux and in principle should run on any platform that supports R and a web server provided that the installer has the necessary security permissions. David’s paper “CGIwithR: Facilities for Processing Web Forms Using R” was published in the Journal of Statistical Software (http://www.jstatsoft.org/v08/i10/). The package is now maintained by Duncan Temple Lang and has a web page athttp://www.omegahat.org/CGIwithR/.
Rpad, developed and actively maintained by Tom Short, provides a sophisticated environment which combines some of the features of the previous approaches with quite a bit of JavaScript, allowing for a GUI-like behavior (with sortable tables, clickable graphics, editable output), etc.
Jeff Horner is working on the R/Apache Integration Project which embeds the R interpreter inside Apache 2 (and beyond). A tutorial and presentation are available from the project web page at http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/twiki/bin/view/Main/RApacheProject.
Rserve is a project actively developed by Simon Urbanek. It implements a TCP/IP server which allows other programs to use facilities of R. Clients are available from the web site for Java and C++ (and could be written for other languages that support TCP/IP sockets).
OpenStatServer is being developed by a team lead by Greg Warnes; it aims “to provide clean access to computational modules defined in a variety of computational environments (R, SAS, Matlab, etc) via a single well-defined client interface” and to turn computational services into web services.
Two projects use PHP to provide a web interface to R. R_PHP_Online by Steve Chen (though it is unclear if this project is still active) is somewhat similar to the above Rcgi and Rweb. R-php is actively developed by Alfredo Pontillo and Angelo Mineo and provides both a web interface to R and a set of pre-specified analyses that need no R code input.
webbioc is “an integrated web interface for doing microarray analysis using several of the Bioconductor packages” and is designed to be installed at local sites as a shared computing resource.
Rwui is a web application to create user-friendly web interfaces for R scripts. All code for the web interface is created automatically. There is no need for the user to do any extra scripting or learn any new scripting techniques. Rwui can also be found at http://rwui.cryst.bbk.ac.uk.
Finally, the R.rsp package by Henrik Bengtsson introduces “R Server Pages”. Analogous to Java Server Pages, an R server page is typically HTMLwith embedded R code that gets evaluated when the page is requested. The package includes an internal cross-platform HTTP server implemented in Tcl, so provides a good framework for including web-based user interfaces in packages. The approach is similar to the use of the brew package withRapache with the advantage of cross-platform support and easy installation.
Also additional R Cloud Computing Use Cases
http://wwwdev.ebi.ac.uk/Tools/rcloud/
Remote access to R/Bioconductor on EBI’s 64-bit Linux ClusterStart the workbench by downloading the package for your operating system (Macintosh or Windows), or via Java Web Start, and you will get access to an instance of R running on one of EBI’s powerful machines. You can install additional packages, upload your own data, work with graphics and collaborate with colleagues, all as if you are running R locally, but unlimited by your machine’s memory, processor or data storage capacity.
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Using R Google Docs
http://www.omegahat.org/RGoogleDocs/run.pdf
It uses the XML and RCurl packages and illustrates that it is relatively quick and easy
to use their primitives to interact with Web services.
Using R with Amazon
Citation
http://rgrossman.com/2009/05/17/running-r-on-amazons-ec2/
Amazon’s EC2 is a type of cloud that provides on demand computing infrastructures called an Amazon Machine Images or AMIs. In general, these types of cloud provide several benefits:
Connecting to R on Amazon EC2- Detailed tutorials
Ubuntu Linux version
https://decisionstats.com/2010/09/25/running-r-on-amazon-ec2/
and Windows R version
https://decisionstats.com/2010/10/02/running-r-on-amazon-ec2-windows/
Connecting R to Data on Google Storage and Computing on Google Prediction API
https://github.com/onertipaday/predictionapirwrapper
R wrapper for working with Google Prediction API
This package consists in a bunch of functions allowing the user to test Google Prediction API from R.
It requires the user to have access to both Google Storage for Developers and Google Prediction API:
see http://code.google.com/apis/storage/ and http://code.google.com/apis/predict/ for details.
Example usage:
#This example requires you had previously created a bucket named data_language on your Google Storage and you had uploaded a CSV file named language_id.txt (your data) into this bucket – see for details
library(predictionapirwrapper)
and Elastic R for Cloud Computing
http://user2010.org/tutorials/Chine.html
Elastic-R is a new portal built using the Biocep-R platform. It enables statisticians, computational scientists, financial analysts, educators and students to use cloud resources seamlessly; to work with R engines and use their full capabilities from within simple browsers; to collaborate, share and reuse functions, algorithms, user interfaces, R sessions, servers; and to perform elastic distributed computing with any number of virtual machines to solve computationally intensive problems.
Also see Karim Chine’s http://biocep-distrib.r-forge.r-project.org/
R for Salesforce.com
At the point of writing this, there seem to be zero R based apps on Salesforce.com This could be a big opportunity for developers as both Apex and R have similar structures Developers could write free code in R and charge for their translated version in Apex on Salesforce.com
Force.com and Salesforce have many (1009) apps at
http://sites.force.com/appexchange/home for cloud computing for
businesses, but very few forecasting and statistical simulation apps.
Example of Monte Carlo based app is here
http://sites.force.com/appexchange/listingDetail?listingId=a0N300000016cT9EAI#
These are like iPhone apps except meant for business purposes (I am
unaware if any university is offering salesforce.com integration
though google apps and amazon related research seems to be on)
Force.com uses a language called Apex and you can see
http://wiki.developerforce.com/index.php/App_Logic and
http://wiki.developerforce.com/index.php/An_Introduction_to_Formulas
Apex is similar to R in that is OOPs
SAS Institute has an existing product for taking in Salesforce.com data.
A new SAS data surveyor is
available to access data from the Customer Relationship Management
(CRM) software vendor Salesforce.com. at
http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/whatsnew/62580/HTML/default/viewer.htm#datasurveyorwhatsnew902.htm)
Personal Note-Mentioning SAS in an email to a R list is a big no-no in terms of getting a response and love. Same for being careless about which R help list to email (like R devel or R packages or R help)
For python based cloud see http://pi-cloud.com
Google just announced it’s tools Big Query and Prediction API for use with it’s new cloud storage device called Google Storage. With this the computing cycle seems to have come a full circle – from mainframe to desktop/servers to cloud. The Prediction API seems interesting but it, and the other services, are quite clearly dependent on market as well as developer enthusiasm. Me thinks, Google knows a thing or two about Big Data, and this one looks like a revenue positive product from Google ( unless they get REST less and let it languish like other great ideas-like Docs,Wave etc)
Also could be interesting is applications from both R, as well as SAS and SPSS to start using this remote data cloud/server farm 😉
With Storage,Querying and Prediction Analysis- Google is definitely in the Infrastructure as a Service business, but success with these services would be crucial to establish it’s name in the formidably lucrative business analytics and business intelligence fields.
http://code.google.com/apis/predict/
http://code.google.com/apis/bigquery/
http://code.google.com/apis/storage/
DECISION STATS 