Tag: Tools

Use R for Business- Competition worth $ 20,000 #rstats

All you contest junkies, R lovers and general change the world people, here’s a new contest to use R in a business application

http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/news-events/news-room/2011/revolution-analytics-launches-applications-of-r-in-business-contest.php

REVOLUTION ANALYTICS LAUNCHES “APPLICATIONS OF R IN BUSINESS” CONTEST

$20,000 in Prizes for Users Solving Business Problems with R

 

PALO ALTO, Calif. – September 1, 2011 – Revolution Analytics, the leading commercial provider of R software, services and support, today announced the launch of its “Applications of R in Business” contest to demonstrate real-world uses of applying R to business problems. The competition is open to all R users worldwide and submissions will be accepted through October 31. The Grand Prize winner for the best application using R or Revolution R will receive $10,000.

The bonus-prize winner for the best application using features unique to Revolution R Enterprise – such as itsbig-data analytics capabilities or its Web Services API for R – will receive $5,000. A panel of independent judges drawn from the R and business community will select the grand and bonus prize winners. Revolution Analytics will present five honorable mention prize winners each with $1,000.

“We’ve designed this contest to highlight the most interesting use cases of applying R and Revolution R to solving key business problems, such as Big Data,” said Jeff Erhardt, COO of Revolution Analytics. “The ability to process higher-volume datasets will continue to be a critical need and we encourage the submission of applications using large datasets. Our goal is to grow the collection of online materials describing how to use R for business applications so our customers can better leverage Big Analytics to meet their analytical and organizational needs.”

To enter Revolution Analytics’ “Applications of R in Business” competition Continue reading “Use R for Business- Competition worth $ 20,000 #rstats”

Google Plus API- statistical text mining anyone

For the past year and two I have noticed a lot of statistical analysis using #rstats /R on unstructured text generated in real time by the social network Twitter. From an analytic point of view , Google Plus is an interesting social network , as it is a social network that is new and arrived after the analytic tools are relatively refined. It is thus an interesting use case for evolution of people behavior measured globally AFTER analytic tools in text mining are evolved and we can thus measure how people behave and that behavior varies as the social network and its user interface evolves.

And it would also be  a nice benchmark to do sentiment analysis across multiple social networks.

Some interesting use cases of using Twitter that have been used in R.

  • Using R to search Twitter for analysis
http://www.franklincenterhq.org/2429/using-r-to-search-twitter-for-analysis/
  • Text Data Mining With Twitter And R
  • TWITTER FROM R… SURE, WHY NOT!
  • A package called TwitteR
  • slides from my R tutorial on Twitter text mining #rstats
  • Generating graphs of retweets and @-messages on Twitter using R and Gephi
But with Google Plus API now active

The Console lets you see and manage the following project information:

  • Activated APIs – Activate one or more APIs to enable traffic monitoring, filtering, and billing, and API-specific pages for your project. Read more about activating APIs here.
  • Traffic information – The Console reports traffic information for each activated API. Additionally, you can cap or filter usage by API. Read more about traffic reporting and request filtering here.
  • Billing information – When you activate billing, your activated APIs can exceed the courtesy usage quota. Usage fees are billed to the Google Checkout account that you specify. Read more about billing here.
  • Project keys – Each project is identified by either an API key or an OAuth 2.0 token. Use this key/token in your API requests to identify the project, in order to record usage data, enforce your filtering restrictions, and bill usage to the proper project. You can use the Console to generate or revoke API keys or OAuth 2.0 certificates to use in your application. Read more about keys here.
  • Team members – You can specify additional members with read, write, or ownership access to this project’s Console page. Read more about team members here.
Google+ API Courtesy limit: 1,000 queries/day

Effective limits:

API Per-User Limit Used Courtesy Limit
Google+ API 5.0 requests/second/user 0% 1,000 queries/day
API Calls
Most of the Google+ API follows a RESTful API design, meaning that you use standard HTTP methods to retrieve and manipulate resources. For example, to get the profile of a user, you might send an HTTP request like:

GET https://www.googleapis.com/plus/v1/people/userId

Common Parameters

Different API methods require parameters to be passed either as part of the URL path or as query parameters. Additionally, there are a few parameters that are common to all API endpoints. These are all passed as optional query parameters.

Parameter Name

Value

Description

callback

string

Specifies a JavaScript function that will be passed the response data for using the API with JSONP.

fields

string

Selector specifying which fields to include in a partial response.

key

string

API key. Your API key identifies your project and provides you with API access, quota, and reports. Required unless you provide an OAuth 2.0 token.

access_token

string

OAuth 2.0 token for the current user. Learn more about OAuth.

prettyPrint

boolean

If set to “true”, data output will include line breaks and indentation to make it more readable. If set to “false”, unnecessary whitespace is removed, reducing the size of the response. Defaults to “true”.

userIp

string

Identifies the IP address of the end user for whom the API call is being made. This allows per-user quotas to be enforced when calling the API from a server-side application. Learn more about Capping Usage.

Data Formats

Resources in the Google+ API are represented using JSON data formats. For example, retrieving a user’s profile may result in a response like:

{
  "kind": "plus#person",
  "id": "118051310819094153327",
  "displayName": "Chirag Shah",
  "url": "https://plus.google.com/118051310819094153327",
  "image": {
    "url": "https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-XnZDEoiF09Y/AAAAAAAAAAI/AAAAAAAAYCI/7fow4a2UTMU/photo.jpg"
  }
}

Common Properties

While each type of resource will have its own unique representation, there are a number of common properties that are found in almost all resource representations.

Property Name

Value

Description

displayName

string

This is the name of the resource, suitable for displaying to a user.

id

string

This property uniquely identifies a resource. Every resource of a given kind will have a unique id. Even though an id may sometimes look like a number, it should always be treated as a string.

kind

string

This identifies what kind of resource a JSON object represents. This is particularly useful when programmatically determining how to parse an unknown object.

url

string

This is the primary URL, or permalink, for the resource.

Pagination

In requests that can respond with potentially large collections, such as Activities list, each response contains a limited number of items, set by maxResults(default: 20). Each response also contains a nextPageToken property. To obtain the next page of items, you pass this value of nextPageToken to the pageTokenproperty of the next request. Repeat this process to page through the full collection.

For example, calling Activities list returns a response with nextPageToken:

{
  "kind": "plus#activityFeed",
  "title": "Plus Public Activities Feed",
  "nextPageToken": "CKaEL",
  "items": [
    {
      "kind": "plus#activity",
      "id": "123456789",
      ...
    },
    ...
  ]
  ...
}

To get the next page of activities, pass the value of this token in with your next Activities list request:

https://www.googleapis.com/plus/v1/people/me/activities/public?pageToken=CKaEL

As before, the response to this request includes nextPageToken, which you can pass in to get the next page of results. You can continue this cycle to get new pages — for the last page, “nextPageToken” will be absent.

 

it would be interesting the first wave of analysis on this new social network and see if it is any different from others, if at all.
After all, an API is only as good as the analysis and applications  that can be done on the data it provides

 

Page Mathematics

I was looking at the site http://www.google.com/adplanner/static/top1000/index.html

and I saw this list (Below) and using a Google Doc at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?hl=en_US&hl=en_US&key=0AtYMMvghK2ytdE9ybmVQeUxMeXdjWlVKYzRlMkxjX0E&output=html.

I then decided to divide  pageviews by users to check the maths

Facebook is AAAAAmazing! and the Russian social network is amazing too!

or

The maths is wrong! (maybe sampling, maybe virtual pageviews caused by friendstream refresh)

but the average of 1,136 page views per unique visitor per month means 36 page views /visitor a Day!

Rank Site     Category        Unique Visitors (users) Page Views Views/Visitors
1  facebook.com	  Social Networks	880000000 1000000000000	1,136
29 linkedin.com	  Social Networks	80000000     2500000000	31
38 orkut.com	  Social Networks	66000000     4000000000	61
40 orkut.com.br	  Social Networks	62000000    43000000000	694
65 weibo.com	  Social Networks	42000000     2800000000	67
66 renren.com	  Social Networks	42000000     3300000000	79
84 odnoklassniki.ru Social Networks	37000000    13000000000	351
90 scribd.com	  Social Networks	34000000      140000000	4
95 vkontakte.ru	  Social Networks	34000000    48000000000	1,412
and
Rank Site	Category  Unique Visitors (users)Page Views	Page Views/Visitors
1 facebook.com	Social Networks	880000000	1000000000000	1,136
2 youtube.com	Online Video	800000000	100000000000	125
3 yahoo.com	Web Portals	590000000	77000000000	131
4 live.com	Search Engines	490000000	84000000000	171
5 msn.com	Web Portals	440000000	20000000000	45
6 wikipedia.org	Dict    	410000000	6000000000	15
7 blogspot.com	Blogging	340000000	4900000000	14
8 baidu.com	Search Engines	300000000	110000000000	367
9 microsoft.com	Software	250000000	2500000000	10
10	 qq.com	Web Portals	250000000	39000000000	156

see complete list at http://www.google.com/adplanner/static/top1000/index.html Continue reading “Page Mathematics”

Interview Dan Steinberg Founder Salford Systems

Here is an interview with Dan Steinberg, Founder and President of Salford Systems (http://www.salford-systems.com/ )

Ajay- Describe your journey from academia to technology entrepreneurship. What are the key milestones or turning points that you remember.

 Dan- When I was in graduate school studying econometrics at Harvard,  a number of distinguished professors at Harvard (and MIT) were actively involved in substantial real world activities.  Professors that I interacted with, or studied with, or whose software I used became involved in the creation of such companies as Sun Microsystems, Data Resources, Inc. or were heavily involved in business consulting through their own companies or other influential consultants.  Some not involved in private sector consulting took on substantial roles in government such as membership on the President’s Council of Economic Advisors. The atmosphere was one that encouraged free movement between academia and the private sector so the idea of forming a consulting and software company was quite natural and did not seem in any way inconsistent with being devoted to the advancement of science.

 Ajay- What are the latest products by Salford Systems? Any future product plans or modification to work on Big Data analytics, mobile computing and cloud computing.

 Dan- Our central set of data mining technologies are CART, MARS, TreeNet, RandomForests, and PRIM, and we have always maintained feature rich logistic regression and linear regression modules. In our latest release scheduled for January 2012 we will be including a new data mining approach to linear and logistic regression allowing for the rapid processing of massive numbers of predictors (e.g., one million columns), with powerful predictor selection and coefficient shrinkage. The new methods allow not only classic techniques such as ridge and lasso regression, but also sub-lasso model sizes. Clear tradeoff diagrams between model complexity (number of predictors) and predictive accuracy allow the modeler to select an ideal balance suitable for their requirements.

The new version of our data mining suite, Salford Predictive Modeler (SPM), also includes two important extensions to the boosted tree technology at the heart of TreeNet.  The first, Importance Sampled learning Ensembles (ISLE), is used for the compression of TreeNet tree ensembles. Starting with, say, a 1,000 tree ensemble, the ISLE compression might well reduce this down to 200 reweighted trees. Such compression will be valuable when models need to be executed in real time. The compression rate is always under the modeler’s control, meaning that if a deployed model may only contain, say, 30 trees, then the compression will deliver an optimal 30-tree weighted ensemble. Needless to say, compression of tree ensembles should be expected to be lossy and how much accuracy is lost when extreme compression is desired will vary from case to case. Prior to ISLE, practitioners have simply truncated the ensemble to the maximum allowable size.  The new methodology will substantially outperform truncation.

The second major advance is RULEFIT, a rule extraction engine that starts with a TreeNet model and decomposes it into the most interesting and predictive rules. RULEFIT is also a tree ensemble post-processor and offers the possibility of improving on the original TreeNet predictive performance. One can think of the rule extraction as an alternative way to explain and interpret an otherwise complex multi-tree model. The rules extracted are similar conceptually to the terminal nodes of a CART tree but the various rules will not refer to mutually exclusive regions of the data.

 Ajay- You have led teams that have won multiple data mining competitions. What are some of your favorite techniques or approaches to a data mining problem.

 Dan- We only enter competitions involving problems for which our technology is suitable, generally, classification and regression. In these areas, we are  partial to TreeNet because it is such a capable and robust learning machine. However, we always find great value in analyzing many aspects of a data set with CART, especially when we require a compact and easy to understand story about the data. CART is exceptionally well suited to the discovery of errors in data, often revealing errors created by the competition organizers themselves. More than once, our reports of data problems have been responsible for the competition organizer’s decision to issue a corrected version of the data and we have been the only group to discover the problem.

In general, tackling a data mining competition is no different than tackling any analytical challenge. You must start with a solid conceptual grasp of the problem and the actual objectives, and the nature and limitations of the data. Following that comes feature extraction, the selection of a modeling strategy (or strategies), and then extensive experimentation to learn what works best.

 Ajay- I know you have created your own software. But are there other software that you use or liked to use?

 Dan- For analytics we frequently test open source software to make sure that our tools will in fact deliver the superior performance we advertise. In general, if a problem clearly requires technology other than that offered by Salford, we advise clients to seek other consultants expert in that other technology.

 Ajay- Your software is installed at 3500 sites including 400 universities as per http://www.salford-systems.com/company/aboutus/index.html What is the key to managing and keeping so many customers happy?

 Dan- First, we have taken great pains to make our software reliable and we make every effort  to avoid problems related to bugs.  Our testing procedures are extensive and we have experts dedicated to stress-testing software . Second, our interface is designed to be natural, intuitive, and easy to use, so the challenges to the new user are minimized. Also, clear documentation, help files, and training videos round out how we allow the user to look after themselves. Should a client need to contact us we try to achieve 24-hour turn around on tech support issues and monitor all tech support activity to ensure timeliness, accuracy, and helpfulness of our responses. WebEx/GotoMeeting and other internet based contact permit real time interaction.

 Ajay- What do you do to relax and unwind?

 Dan- I am in the gym almost every day combining weight and cardio training. No matter how tired I am before the workout I always come out energized so locating a good gym during my extensive travels is a must. I am also actively learning Portuguese so I look to watch a Brazilian TV show or Portuguese dubbed movie when I have time; I almost never watch any form of video unless it is available in Portuguese.

 Biography-

http://www.salford-systems.com/blog/dan-steinberg.html

Dan Steinberg, President and Founder of Salford Systems, is a well-respected member of the statistics and econometrics communities. In 1992, he developed the first PC-based implementation of the original CART procedure, working in concert with Leo Breiman, Richard Olshen, Charles Stone and Jerome Friedman. In addition, he has provided consulting services on a number of biomedical and market research projects, which have sparked further innovations in the CART program and methodology.

Dr. Steinberg received his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University, and has given full day presentations on data mining for the American Marketing Association, the Direct Marketing Association and the American Statistical Association. After earning a PhD in Econometrics at Harvard Steinberg began his professional career as a Member of the Technical Staff at Bell Labs, Murray Hill, and then as Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego. A book he co-authored on Classification and Regression Trees was awarded the 1999 Nikkei Quality Control Literature Prize in Japan for excellence in statistical literature promoting the improvement of industrial quality control and management.

His consulting experience at Salford Systems has included complex modeling projects for major banks worldwide, including Citibank, Chase, American Express, Credit Suisse, and has included projects in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Korea, Japan and Brazil. Steinberg led the teams that won first place awards in the KDDCup 2000, and the 2002 Duke/TeraData Churn modeling competition, and the teams that won awards in the PAKDD competitions of 2006 and 2007. He has published papers in economics, econometrics, computer science journals, and contributes actively to the ongoing research and development at Salford.

#rstats -Basic Data Manipulation using R

Continuing my series of basic data manipulation using R. For people knowing analytics and
new to R.
1 Keeping only some variables

Using subset we can keep only the variables we want-

Sitka89 <- subset(Sitka89, select=c(size,Time,treat))

Will keep only the variables we have selected (size,Time,treat).

2 Dropping some variables

Harman23.cor$cov.arm.span <- NULL
This deletes the variable named cov.arm.span in the dataset Harman23.cor

3 Keeping records based on character condition

Titanic.sub1<-subset(Titanic,Sex=="Male")

Note the double equal-to sign
4 Keeping records based on date/time condition

subset(DF, as.Date(Date) >= '2009-09-02' & as.Date(Date) <= '2009-09-04')

5 Converting Date Time Formats into other formats

if the variable dob is “01/04/1977) then following will convert into a date object

z=strptime(dob,”%d/%m/%Y”)

and if the same date is 01Apr1977

z=strptime(dob,"%d%b%Y")

6 Difference in Date Time Values and Using Current Time

The difftime function helps in creating differences in two date time variables.

difftime(time1, time2, units='secs')

or

difftime(time1, time2, tz = "", units = c("auto", "secs", "mins", "hours", "days", "weeks"))

For current system date time values you can use

Sys.time()

Sys.Date()

This value can be put in the difftime function shown above to calculate age or time elapsed.

7 Keeping records based on numerical condition

Titanic.sub1<-subset(Titanic,Freq >37)

For enhanced usage-
you can also use the R Commander GUI with the sub menu Data > Active Dataset

8 Sorting Data

Sorting A Data Frame in Ascending Order by a variable

AggregatedData<- sort(AggregatedData, by=~ Package)

Sorting a Data Frame in Descending Order by a variable

AggregatedData<- sort(AggregatedData, by=~ -Installed)

9 Transforming a Dataset Structure around a single variable

Using the Reshape2 Package we can use melt and acast functions

library("reshape2")

tDat.m<- melt(tDat)

tDatCast<- acast(tDat.m,Subject~Item)

If we choose not to use Reshape package, we can use the default reshape method in R. Please do note this takes longer processing time for bigger datasets.

df.wide <- reshape(df, idvar="Subject", timevar="Item", direction="wide")

10 Type in Data

Using scan() function we can type in data in a list

11 Using Diff for lags and Cum Sum function forCumulative Sums

We can use the diff function to calculate difference between two successive values of a variable.

Diff(Dataset$X)

Cumsum function helps to give cumulative sum

Cumsum(Dataset$X)

> x=rnorm(10,20) #This gives 10 Randomly distributed numbers with Mean 20

> x

[1] 20.76078 19.21374 18.28483 20.18920 21.65696 19.54178 18.90592 20.67585

[9] 20.02222 18.99311

> diff(x)

[1] -1.5470415 -0.9289122 1.9043664 1.4677589 -2.1151783 -0.6358585 1.7699296

[8] -0.6536232 -1.0291181 >

cumsum(x)

[1] 20.76078 39.97453 58.25936 78.44855 100.10551 119.64728 138.55320

[8] 159.22905 179.25128 198.24438

> diff(x,2) # The diff function can be used as diff(x, lag = 1, differences = 1, ...) where differences is the order of differencing

[1] -2.4759536 0.9754542 3.3721252 -0.6474195 -2.7510368 1.1340711 1.1163064

[8] -1.6827413

Becker, R. A., Chambers, J. M. and Wilks, A. R. (1988) The New S Language. Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole.

12 Merging Data

Deducer GUI makes it much simpler to merge datasets. The simplest syntax for a merge statement is

totalDataframeZ <- merge(dataframeX,dataframeY,by=c("AccountId","Region"))

13 Aggregating and group processing of a variable

We can use multiple methods for aggregating and by group processing of variables.
Two functions we explore here are aggregate and Tapply.

Refering to the R Online Manual at
[http://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-patched/library/stats/html/aggregate.html]

## Compute the averages for the variables in 'state.x77', grouped

## according to the region (Northeast, South, North Central, West) that

## each state belongs to

aggregate(state.x77, list(Region = state.region), mean)

Using TApply

## tapply(Summary Variable, Group Variable, Function)

Reference

[http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/r/library/advanced_function_r.htm#tapply]

We can also use specialized packages for data manipulation.

For additional By-group processing you can see the doBy package as well as Plyr package
 for data manipulation.Doby contains a variety of utilities including:
 1) Facilities for groupwise computations of summary statistics and other facilities for working with grouped data.
 2) General linear contrasts and LSMEANS (least-squares-means also known as population means),
 3) HTMLreport for autmatic generation of HTML file from R-script with a minimum of markup, 4) various other utilities and is available at[ http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/doBy/index.html]
Also Available at [http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/plyr/index.html],
Plyr is a set of tools that solves a common set of problems:
you need to break a big problem down into manageable pieces,
operate on each pieces and then put all the pieces back together.
 For example, you might want to fit a model to each spatial location or
 time point in your study, summarise data by panels or collapse high-dimensional arrays
 to simpler summary statistics.

So how useful is Data.gov anyway

As per official statistics, not many people download data from it .

Why dont they just donate the data and save taxpayers some money

http://www.data.gov/metric

Summary

Agency/Sub-Agency/Organization Raw Datasets
(high-value)		 Tools
(high-value)		 Geodata Total Latest Entry # of times downloaded
within the last week*
TOTAL
 3,486 (2,163) 1,071 (393) 386,429 390,986 08/24/2011 0

* These numbers represent the number of times a user has clicked on the “XML” or “CSV” (for example) links in the Raw Data Catalogs to download datasets and user downloads of tools in the Tool Catalog available in these categories.

But apparently lots of people like it still

http://www.data.gov/metric/visitorstats/monthlyredirecttrend

More list of public data repositories-

Google http://www.google.com/publicdata/directory

DataMob http://datamob.org/datasets

Amazon http://aws.amazon.com/publicdatasets/

DataMarket http://datamarket.com/

Infochimps http://www.infochimps.com/

From SEC, the Edgar  http://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/companysearch.html

More lists of lists

http://www.kdnuggets.com/2011/02/free-public-datasets.html

But who  gets more downloads last week than Data.gov !

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.