Tag: research
RCOMM 2012 goes live in August
An awesome conference by an awesome software Rapid Miner remains one of the leading enterprise grade open source software , that can help you do a lot of things including flow driven data modeling ,web mining ,web crawling etc which even other software cant.
Presentations include:
- Mining Machine 2 Machine Data (Katharina Morik, TU Dortmund University)
- Handling Big Data (Andras Benczur, MTA SZTAKI)
- Introduction of RapidAnalytics at Telenor (Telenor and United Consult)
- and more
Here is a list of complete program
Program
Time
|
Tuesday
|
Wednesday
|
Thursday
|
Friday
|
09:00 – 10:30 |
Introductory Speech Ingo Mierswa (Rapid-I)Resource-aware Data Mining or M2M Mining (Invited Talk) Katharina Morik (TU Dortmund University)
Data Analysis
NeurophRM: Integration of the Neuroph framework into RapidMiner |
To be announced (Invited Talk) Andras Benczur Recommender Systems
Extending RapidMiner with Recommender Systems Algorithms Implementation of User Based Collaborative Filtering in RapidMiner |
Parallel Training / Workshop Session
Advanced Data Mining and Data Transformations or |
|
10:30 – 11:00 |
Coffee Break |
Coffee Break |
Coffee Break |
|
11:00 – 12:30 |
Data Analysis
Nearest-Neighbor and Clustering based Anomaly Detection Algorithms for RapidMiner Customers’ LifeStyle Targeting on Big Data using Rapid Miner Robust GPGPU Plugin Development for RapidMiner |
Extensions
Optimization Plugin For RapidMiner
Image Mining Extension – Year After Incorporating R Plots into RapidMiner Reports |
||
12:30 – 13:30 |
Lunch |
Lunch |
Lunch |
|
13:30 – 15:30 |
Parallel Training / Workshop Session
Basic Data Mining and Data Transformations or |
Applications
Introduction of RapidAnalyticy Enterprise Edition at Telenor Hungary
Application of RapidMiner in Steel Industry Research and Development A Comparison of Data-driven Models for Forecast River Flow Portfolio Optimization Using Local Linear Regression Ensembles in Rapid Miner |
Extensions
An Octave Extension for RapidMiner
Unstructured Data
Processing Data Streams with the RapidMiner Streams-Plugin Automated Creation of Corpuses for the Needs of Sentiment Analysis
Demonstration: News from the Rapid-I Labs This short session demonstrates the latest developments from the Rapid-I lab and will let you how you can build powerful analysis processes and routines by using those RapidMiner tools. |
Certification Exam |
15:30 – 16:00 |
Coffee Break |
Coffee Break |
Coffee Break |
|
16:00 – 18:00 |
Book Presentation and Game Show
Data Mining for the Masses: A New Textbook on Data Mining for Everyone Matthew North presents his new book “Data Mining for the Masses” introducing data mining to a broader audience and making use of RapidMiner for practical data mining problems.
Game Show |
User Support
Get some Coffee for free – Writing Operators with RapidMiner Beans Meta-Modeling Execution Times of RapidMiner operators Conference day ends at ca. 17:00. |
||
19:30 |
Social Event (Conference Dinner) |
Social Event (Visit of Bar District) |
and you should have a look at https://rapid-i.com/rcomm2012f/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=65
Conference is in Budapest, Hungary,Europe.
( Disclaimer- Rapid Miner is an advertising sponsor of Decisionstats.com in case you didnot notice the two banner sized ads.)
Interview Rob J Hyndman Forecasting Expert #rstats
Here is an interview with Prof Rob J Hyndman who has created many time series forecasting methods and authored books as well as R packages on the same.
Probably the biggest impact I’ve had is in helping the Australian government forecast the national health budget. In 2001 and 2002, they had underestimated health expenditure by nearly $1 billion in each year which is a lot of money to have to find, even for a national government. I was invited to assist them in developing a new forecasting method, which I did. The new method has forecast errors of the order of plus or minus $50 million which is much more manageable. The method I developed for them was the basis of the ETS models discussed in my 2008 book on exponential smoothing (www.exponentialsmoothing.net)
Interview John Myles White , Machine Learning for Hackers
Here is an interview with one of the younger researchers and rock stars of the R Project, John Myles White, co-author of Machine Learning for Hackers.
Ajay- What inspired you guys to write Machine Learning for Hackers. What has been the public response to the book. Are you planning to write a second edition or a next book?
John-We decided to write Machine Learning for Hackers because there were so many people interested in learning more about Machine Learning who found the standard textbooks a little difficult to understand, either because they lacked the mathematical background expected of readers or because it wasn’t clear how to translate the mathematical definitions in those books into usable programs. Most Machine Learning books are written for audiences who will not only be using Machine Learning techniques in their applied work, but also actively inventing new Machine Learning algorithms. The amount of information needed to do both can be daunting, because, as one friend pointed out, it’s similar to insisting that everyone learn how to build a compiler before they can start to program. For most people, it’s better to let them try out programming and get a taste for it before you teach them about the nuts and bolts of compiler design. If they like programming, they can delve into the details later.
Ajay- What are the key things that a potential reader can learn from this book?
John- We cover most of the nuts and bolts of introductory statistics in our book: summary statistics, regression and classification using linear and logistic regression, PCA and k-Nearest Neighbors. We also cover topics that are less well known, but are as important: density plots vs. histograms, regularization, cross-validation, MDS, social network analysis and SVM’s. I hope a reader walks away from the book having a feel for what different basic algorithms do and why they work for some problems and not others. I also hope we do just a little to shift a future generation of modeling culture towards regularization and cross-validation.
Ajay- Describe your journey as a science student up till your Phd. What are you current research interests and what initiatives have you done with them?
John-As an undergraduate I studied math and neuroscience. I then took some time off and came back to do a Ph.D. in psychology, focusing on mathematical modeling of both the brain and behavior. There’s a rich tradition of machine learning and statistics in psychology, so I got increasingly interested in ML methods during my years as a grad student. I’m about to finish my Ph.D. this year. My research interests all fall under one heading: decision theory. I want to understand both how people make decisions (which is what psychology teaches us) and how they should make decisions (which is what statistics and ML teach us). My thesis is focused on how people make decisions when there are both short-term and long-term consequences to be considered. For non-psychologists, the classic example is probably the explore-exploit dilemma. I’ve been working to import more of the main ideas from stats and ML into psychology for modeling how real people handle that trade-off. For psychologists, the classic example is the Marshmallow experiment. Most of my research work has focused on the latter: what makes us patient and how can we measure patience?
Ajay- How can academia and private sector solve the shortage of trained data scientists (assuming there is one)?
John- There’s definitely a shortage of trained data scientists: most companies are finding it difficult to hire someone with the real chops needed to do useful work with Big Data. The skill set required to be useful at a company like Facebook or Twitter is much more advanced than many people realize, so I think it will be some time until there are undergraduates coming out with the right stuff. But there’s huge demand, so I’m sure the market will clear sooner or later.
(TIL he has played in several rock bands!)
Interview Alain Chesnais Chief Scientist Trendspottr.com
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. )
- 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)
- 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.
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.
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.
Rapid Miner User Conference 2012
One of those cool conferences that is on my bucket list- this time in Hungary (That’s a nice place)
But I am especially interested in seeing how far Radoop has come along !
Disclaimer- Rapid Miner has been a Decisionstats.com sponsor for many years. It is also a very cool software but I like the R Extension facility even more!
—————————————————————
and not very expensive too compared to other User Conferences in Europe!-
http://rcomm2012.org/index.php/registration/prices
Information about Registration
- Early Bird registration until July 20th, 2012.
- Normal registration from July 21st, 2012 until August 13th, 2012.
- Latest registration from August 14th, 2012 until August 24th, 2012.
- Students have to provide a valid Student ID during registration.
- The Dinner is included in the All Days and in the Conference packages.
- All prices below are net prices. Value added tax (VAT) has to be added if applicable.
Prices for Regular Visitors
Days and Event |
Early Bird Rate |
Normal Rate |
Latest Registration |
Tuesday
(Training / Development 1) |
190 Euro | 230 Euro | 280 Euro |
Wednesday + Thursday
(Conference) |
290 Euro | 350 Euro | 420 Euro |
Friday
(Training / Development 2 and Exam) |
190 Euro | 230 Euro | 280 Euro |
All Days
(Full Package) |
610 Euro | 740 Euro | 900 Euro |
Prices for Authors and Students
In case of students, please note that you will have to provide a valid student ID during registration.
Days and Event |
Early Bird Rate |
Normal Rate |
Latest Registration |
Tuesday
(Training / Development 1) |
90 Euro | 110 Euro | 140 Euro |
Wednesday + Thursday
(Conference) |
140 Euro | 170 Euro | 210 Euro |
Friday
(Training / Development 2 and Exam) |
90 Euro | 110 Euro | 140 Euro |
All Days
(Full Package) |
290 Euro | 350 Euro | 450 Euro |
Time
|
Tuesday
|
Wednesday
|
Thursday
|
Friday
|
09:00 – 10:30 |
Introductory Speech Ingo Mierswa; Rapid-I
Data Analysis
NeurophRM: Integration of the Neuroph framework into RapidMiner |
To be announced (Invited Talk) To be announced
Recommender Systems
Extending RapidMiner with Recommender Systems Algorithms Implementation of User Based Collaborative Filtering in RapidMiner |
Parallel Training / Workshop Session
Advanced Data Mining and Data Transformations or |
|
10:30 – 12:30 |
Data Analysis
Nearest-Neighbor and Clustering based Anomaly Detection Algorithms for RapidMiner Customers’ LifeStyle Targeting on Big Data using Rapid Miner Robust GPGPU Plugin Development for RapidMiner |
Extensions
Image Mining Extension – Year After Incorporating R Plots into RapidMiner Reports An Octave Extension for RapidMiner |
||
12:30 – 13:30 |
Lunch |
Lunch |
Lunch |
|
13:30 – 15:00 |
Parallel Training / Workshop Session
Basic Data Mining and Data Transformations or |
Applications
Application of RapidMiner in Steel Industry Research and Development A Comparison of Data-driven Models for Forecast River Flow Portfolio Optimization Using Local Linear Regression Ensembles in Rapid Miner |
Unstructured Data
Processing Data Streams with the RapidMiner Streams-Plugin Automated Creation of Corpuses for the Needs of Sentiment Analysis
Demonstration
News from the Rapid-I Labs This short session demonstrates the latest developments from the Rapid-I lab and will let you how you can build powerful analysis processes and routines by using those RapidMiner tools. |
Certification Exam |
15:00 – 17:00 |
Book Presentation and Game Show
Data Mining for the Masses: A New Textbook on Data Mining for Everyone Matthew North presents his new book “Data Mining for the Masses” introducing data mining to a broader audience and making use of RapidMiner for practical data mining problems.
Game Show |
User Support
Get some Coffee for free – Writing Operators with RapidMiner Beans Meta-Modeling Execution Times of RapidMiner operators |
||
19:00 |
Social Event (Conference Dinner) |
Social Event (Visit of Bar District) |
Training: Basic Data Mining and Data Transformations
This is a short introductory training course for users who are not yet familiar with RapidMiner or only have a few experiences with RapidMiner so far. The topics of this training session include
- Basic Usage
- User Interface
- Creating and handling RapidMiner repositories
- Starting a new RapidMiner project
- Operators and processes
- Loading data from flat files
- Storing data, processes, and results
- Predictive Models
- Linear Regression
- Naïve Bayes
- Decision Trees
- Basic Data Transformations
- Changing names and roles
- Handling missing values
- Changing value types by discretization and dichotimization
- Normalization and standardization
- Filtering examples and attributes
- Scoring and Model Evaluation
- Applying models
- Splitting data
- Evaluation methods
- Performance criteria
- Visualizing Model Performance
Training: Advanced Data Mining and Data Transformations
This is a short introductory training course for users who already know some basic concepts of RapidMiner and data mining and have already used the software before, for example in the first training on Tuesday. The topics of this training session include
- Advanced Data Handling
- Sampling
- Balancing data
- Joins and Aggregations
- Detection and removal of outliers
- Dimensionality reduction
- Control process execution
- Remember process results
- Recall process results
- Loops
- Using branches and conditions
- Exception handling
- Definition of macros
- Usage of macros
- Definition of log values
- Clearing log tables
- Transforming log tables to data
Development Workshop Part 1 and Part 2
Want to exchange ideas with the developers of RapidMiner? Or learn more tricks for developing own operators and extensions? During our development workshops on Tuesday and Friday, we will build small groups of developers each working on a small development project around RapidMiner. Beginners will get a comprehensive overview of the architecture of RapidMiner before making the first steps and learn how to write own operators. Advanced developers will form groups with our experienced developers, identify shortcomings of RapidMiner and develop a new extension which might be presented during the conference already. Unfinished work can be continued in the second workshop on Friday before results might be published on the Marketplace or can be taken home as a starting point for new custom operators.
Interview Jason Kuo SAP Analytics #Rstats
Here is an interview with Jason Kuo who works with SAP Analytics as Group Solutions Marketing Manager. Jason answers questions on SAP Analytics and it’s increasing involvement with R statistical language.
Ajay- What made you choose R as the language to tie important parts of your technology platform like HANA and SAP Predictive Analysis. Did you consider other languages like Julia or Python.
Jason- It’s the most popular. Over 50% of the statisticians and data analysts use R. With 3,500+ algorithms its arguably the most comprehensive statistical analysis language. That said,we are not closing the door on others.
Ajay- When did you first start getting interested in R as an analytics platform?
Jason- SAP has been tracking R for 5+ years. With R’s explosive growth over the last year or two, it made sense for us to dramatically increase our investment in R.
Ajay- Can we expect SAP to give back to the R community like Google and Revolution Analytics does- by sponsoring Package development or sponsoring user meets and conferences?
Will we see SAP’s R HANA package in this year’s R conference User 2012 in Nashville
Jason- Yes. We plan to provide a specific driver for HANA tables for input of the data to native R. This planned for end of 2012. We’ll then review our event strategy. SAP has been a sponsor of Predictive Analytics World for several years and was indeed a founding sponsor. We may be attending the year’s R conference in Nashville.
Ajay- What has been some of the initial customer feedback to your analytics expansion and offerings.
Jason- We have completed two very successful Pilots of the R Integration for HANA with two of SAP’s largest customers.
About-
Jason has over 15 years of BI and Data Warehousing industry experience. Having worked at Oracle, Business Objects, and now SAP, Jason has been involved in numerous technical marketing roles involving performance management dashboards, information management, text analysis, predictive analytics, and now big data. He has a bachelor’s of science in operations research from the University of Michigan.