New Deal in Statistical Training

The United States Government is planning a new initiative at providing employable skills to people, to cope with unemployment.
One skill perpetually in shortage is analytics training along with skills in statistics.

It is time that corporates like IBM SPSS, SAS Institute and Revolution Analytics as well as offshore companies in India or Asia can ramp up their on demand trainings, certification as well as academic partnership bundles. Indeed offshroing companies can earn revenue as well as goodwill if they help in with trainers available via video- conferencing. The new Deal initiative would require creative thinking as well as direct top management support to focus their best internal brains at developing this new revenue stream. Again the company that trains the most users (be it Revolution for R, IBM for SPSS-Cognos, SAS Institute for Base SAS-JMP, WPS for SAS language) is going to get a bigger chunk of new users and analysts.

Analytics skills are hot. There is big new demand for hot new skills by millions of unemployed Americans and Asians. How do you think this services market will play out?

If the US government could pump 800 Billion for bailouts, how much is your opinion it should spend on training programs to help citizens compete globally?

From http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/business/economy/03skills.html?hpw

The national program is a response to frustrations from both workers and employers who complain that public retraining programs frequently do not provide students with employable skills. This new initiative is intended to help better align community college curriculums with the demands of local companies.

SAS recognizes the market –

see http://www.sas.com/news/preleases/aba-tech-engage.html

In tough economic times, it is more important than ever that companies be able to make better decisions using analytics. SAS is involved in two programs this summer that offer MBAs and unemployed technology workers the opportunity to learn and enhance analytics skills, and increase their marketability.

SAS is a partner in TechEngage, a week-long program of training classes that offer unemployed technology professionals new skills at a low cost to help them compete effectively in the marketplace.”

So does IBM-

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/28994.wss

. “Fordham has a long history of collaboration with IBM that has brought innovative new skills to our curriculum to prepare students for future jobs. With this effort, Fordham is preparing students with marketable skills for a coming wave of jobs in healthcare, sustainability, and social services where analytics can be applied to everyday challenges.”

and R

Well TIBCO and Revolution ….hmmm…mmmm

I am not sure there is even a R Analytics Certification program at the least.

Red Hat worth 7.8 Billion now

I was searching for a Linux install of Revolution’s latest enterprise version, but it seems version 4 will be available on Red Hat Enterprise Linux only by Decemebr 2010. Also even though Revolution once opted for co branding with Canonical’s Karmic Koala, they seem to have ignored Ubuntu from the Enterprise version of Revolution R.

http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/why-revolution-r/which-r-is-right-for-me.php

Base R Revolution R Community Revolution R Enterprise
Buy Now
Target Use Open Source Product Evaluation & Simple Prototyping Business, Research & Academics
Software
100% Compatible with R language X X X
Certified for Stability X X
Command-Line Programming X X X
Getting Started Guide X X
Performance & Scalability
Analyze larger data sets with 64-bit RAM X X
Optimized for Multi-processor workstations X X
Multi-threaded Math libraries X X
Parallel Programming (Single Workstation) X X
Out-of-the-Box Cluster-Ready X
“Big Data” Analysis
Terabyte-Class File Structures X
Specialized “Big Data” Algorithms X
Integrated Web Services
Scalable Web Services Platform X*
User Interface
Visual IDE X
Comprehensive Data Analysis GUI X*
Technical Support
Discussion Forums X X X
Online Support Mailing List Forum X
Email Support X
Phone Support X
Support for Base & Recommended R Packages X X X
Authorized Training & Consulting X
Platforms
Single User X X X
Multi-User Server X X
32-bit Windows X X X
64-bit Windows X X
Mac OS X X X
Ubuntu Linux X X
Red Hat Enterprise Linux X
Cloud-Ready X

and though the page on RED HAT’s Partner page for Revolution seems old/not so updated

https://www.redhat.com/wapps/partnerlocator/web/home.html;#productId=188

, I was still curious to see what the buzz about Red Hat is all about.

And one of the answers is Red Hat is now a 7.8 Billion Dollar Company.

http://www.redhat.com/about/news/prarchive/2010/Q2_2011.html

Red Hat Reports Second Quarter Results

  • Revenue of $220 million, up 20% from the prior year
  • GAAP operating income up 24%, non-GAAP operating income up 25% from the prior year
  • Deferred revenue of $650 million, up 12% from the prior year

RALEIGH, NC – Sept 22, 2010 – Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced financial results for its fiscal year 2011 second quarter ended August 31, 2010.

Total revenue for the quarter was $219.8 million, an increase of 20% from the year ago quarter. Subscription revenue for the quarter was $186.2 million, up 19% year-over-year.

and the stock goes zoom 48 % up for the year

http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1285505944359&chddm=98141&chls=IntervalBasedLine&cmpto=INDEXDJX:.DJI;NASDAQ:ORCL;NASDAQ:MSFT;NYSE:IBM&cmptdms=0;0;0;0&q=NYSE:RHT&ntsp=0

(Note to Google- please put the URL shortener on Google Finance as well)

The software is also reasonably priced starting from 80$ onwards.

https://www.redhat.com/apps/store/desktop/

Basic Subscription

Web support, 2 business day response, unlimited incidents
1 Year
$80
Multi-OS with Basic SubscriptionWeb support, 2 business day response, unlimited incidents
1 Year
$120
Workstation with Basic Subscription
Web support, 2 business day response, unlimited incidents
1 Year
$179
Workstation and Multi-OS with Basic Subscription
Web support, 2 business day response, unlimited incidents
1 Year
$219
Workstation with Standard Subscription
Business Hours phone support, web support, unlimited incidents
1 Year
$299
Workstation and Multi-OS with Standard Subscription
Business Hours phone support, web support, unlimited incidents
1 Year
$339
——————————————————————————————
That should be a good enough case for open source as a business model.




KXEN EMEA User Conference 2010-Success in Business Analytics

KXEN User Conference-Prelim Agenda is out

Source-

http://www.kxen.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=647&Itemid=1109

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2010
09:30-10:00 AM Registration & Breakfast

10:00-10:45 AM Welcome & Opening Remarks,
by John Ball, CEO KXEN
10:45-11:30 AM Keynote Session by James Kobielus,
Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, Inc. and author
of “The Forrester WaveTM: Predictive Analytics & Data Mining Solutions, Q1 2010” report 

11:30-12:05 AM Customer Case Study:
The European Commission (Government)
12:05-12:50 PM General Session:
Teradata Advanced Analytics
12:50-02:00 PM Lunch Break & Exhibition
02:00-02:35 PM Customer Case Study: 
Virgin Media
(Communications)
02:35-03:05 PM General Session:
Sponsor Presentation
03:05-03:40 PM
Coffee Break & Exhibition

03:40-04:40 PM General Session:
The Factory Approach to Compete on Analytics
04:40-05:25 PM Customer Case Study: 
Insurance
05:30-06:30 PM Cocktail & Exhibition
07:30-00:00 PM Gala Dinner
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2010
08:30-09:00 AM
Registration & Breakfast

09:00-10:00 AM Keynote Presentation:
The CTO Talk
10:00-10:30 AM Customer Case Study: 
MonotaRO
(Japan – Retail)
10:30-10:55 AM
Coffee Break & Exhibition

10:55-11:30 AM General Session: 
Sponsor Presentation
11:30-12:05 PM Customer Case Study: 
Aviva
(Poland – Insurance)
12:05-01:00 PM Lunch Break & Exhibition
01:00-01:45 PM General Session: 
How Social Network Analysis Can Boost your Marketing Performance
01:45-02:20 PM Customer Case Study:
Financial Services
02:20-02:45 PM Closing Remarks,
by John Ball, CEO KXEN
02:45-03:00 PM
Coffee Break & Exhibition

Optional: Technical Training (Complimentary to all Attendees)
02:45-04:00 PM Hands-On Training #1: Getting Started with KXEN Analytical Data Management (ADM)
04:00-04:15 PM
Coffee Break

04:15-05:30 PM Hands-On Training #2: Getting Started with KXEN Modeling Factory (KMF)

Oracle Open World/ RODM package

From the press release, here comes Oracle Open World. They really have an excellent rock concert in that as well.

.NET and Windows @ Oracle Develop and Oracle OpenWorld 2010

Oracle Develop will again feature a .NET track for Oracle developers. Oracle Develop is suited for all levels of .NET developers, from beginner to advanced. It covers introductory Oracle .NET material, new features, deep dive application tuning, and includes three hours of hands-on labs apply what you learned from the sessions.

To register, go to Oracle Develop registration site.

Oracle OpenWorld will include several sessions on using the Oracle Database on Windows and .NET.

Session schedules and locations for Windows and .NET sessions at Oracle Develop and OpenWorld are now available.

Download: 32-bit ODAC 11.2.0.1.2 for Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4

With ODAC 11.2.0.1.2, developers can connect to Oracle Database versions 9.2 and higher from Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4. ODAC components support the full framework, as well as the new .NET Framework Client Profile.

Statement of Direction: Oracle Database and Microsoft Entity Framework

Learn about Oracle’s beta and production plans to support Microsoft Entity Framework with Oracle Database.

Also see http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/datawarehouse/saternos-r-161569.html

for

Data Mining Using the RDOM Package

By Casimir Saternos

Some excerpts-

Open R and enter the following command.

> library(RODM)

This command loads the RODM library and as well the dependent RODBC package. The next step is to make a database connection.

> DB <- RODM_open_dbms_connection(dsn="orcl", uid="dm", pwd="dm")

Subsequent commands use the DB object (an instance of the RODBC class) to connect to the database. The DNS specified in the command is the name you used earlier for the Data Source Name during the ODBC connection configuration. You can view the actual R code being executed by the command by simply typing the function name (without parentheses).

> RODM_open_dbms_connection

And say making a Model in Oracle and R-

> numrows <- length(orange_data[,1])
> orange_data.rows <- length(orange_data[,1])
> orange_data.id <- matrix(seq(1, orange_data.rows),  nrow=orange_data.rows, ncol=1, dimnames= list(NULL, c(“CASE_ID”)))
> orange_data <- cbind(orange_data.id, orange_data)

This adjustment to the data frame then needs to be propagated to the database. You can confirm the change using the sqlColumns function, as listed earlier.

> RODM_create_dbms_table(DB, "orange_data")
> sqlColumns(DB, 'orange_data')$COLUMN_NAME

> glm <- RODM_create_glm_model(
database = DB,
data_table_name = “orange_data”,
case_id_column_name = “CASE_ID”,
target_column_name = “circumference”,
model_name = “GLM_MODEL”,
mining_function = “regression”)

Information about this model can then be obtained by analyzing value returned from the model and stored in the variable named glm.

> glm$model.model_settings
> glm$glm.globals
> $glm.coefficients

Once you have a model, you can apply the model to a new set of data. To begin, create or retrieve sample data in the same format as the training data.

> query<-('select 999 case_id, 1 tree, 120 age, 
32 circumference from dual')

> orange_test<-sqlQuery(DB, query)
> RODM_create_dbms_table(DB, "orange_test")
and 
Finally, the model can be applied to the new data set and the results analyzed.

results <- RODM_apply_model(database = DB, 
data_table_name = "orange_test",
model_name = "GLM_MODEL",
supplemental_cols = "circumference")

When your session is complete, you can clean up objects that were created (if you like) and you should close the database connection:

> RODM_drop_model(database=DB,'GLM_MODEL')
> RODM_drop_dbms_table(DB, "orange_test")
> RODM_drop_dbms_table(DB, "orange_data")
> RODM_close_dbms_connection(DB)

See the full article at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/datawarehouse/saternos-r-161569.html

My latest creation

I have just teamed up to create my latest venture called Kush Cognitives (Kush is my son). The firm is gonna make websites, build statistical analysis and offer social media offerings. It’s my latest venture and it merges all my previous ones and skills. After almost 3 years of working on and off with multiple people, this one is with a friend in the US.

Over the years (since 2007) I have made http://virtua-analytics.com (defunct), Swarajya Analytics Private Limited (www.swanplc.com – now sold) and now Kush Cognitives. I have gone through the models of proprietorship and corporation and now partnership.

Kush Cognitives is hosted at Decisionstats.com (as our flagship website) and we have shifted the blog to Decisionstats.Wordpress.com

We are aiming at the startups and small and medium segments first, but we retain capabilities for bigger clients as well. Lesser Bullshit and More Bang for your Buck.

So wish us luck- and if you need any social media advice, statistical analysis to be done, or technical matters of creating websites-This also includes training customization in R , SAS  , and statistical software but from a more practical point of view from a user angle. We are able to cater to both US and Indian clients.

give us a buzz at http://decisionstats.com

regards

Ajay Ohri

Image Courtesy-michelangelo

SAS Sentiment Analysis wins Award

From Business Wire, the new Sentiment Analysis product by SAS Institute (created by acquisition Teragram ) wins an award. As per wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentiment_analysis

Sentiment analysis or opinion mining refers to a broad (definitionally challenged) area of natural language processingcomputational linguistics and text mining. Generally speaking, it aims to determine the attitude of a speaker or a writer with respect to some topic. The attitude may be their judgment or evaluation (see appraisal theory), their affective state (that is to say, the emotional state of the author when writing) or the intended emotional communication (that is to say, the emotional effect the author wishes to have on the reader).

It was developed by Teragram. Here is another Sentiment Analysis tool from Stanford Grad school at http://twittersentiment.appspot.com/search?query=sas

See-

Sentiment analysis for sas

Image Citation-

http://threeminds.organic.com/2009/09/five_reasons_sentiment_analysi.html

Read an article on sentiment analysis here at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/technology/internet/24emotion.html

And the complete press release at http://goo.gl/iVzf`

SAS Sentiment Analysis delivers insights on customer, competitor and organizational opinions to a degree never before possible via manual review of electronic text. As a result, SAS, the leader in business analytics software and services, has earned the prestigious Communications Solutions Product of the Year Award fromTechnology Marketing Corporation (TMC).

“SAS has automated the time-consuming process of reading individual documents and manually extracting relevant information”

“SAS Sentiment Analysis has shown benefits for its customers and it provides ROI for the companies that use it,” said Rich Tehrani, CEO, TMC. “Congratulations to the entire team at SAS, a company distinguished by its dedication to software quality and superiority to address marketplace needs.”

Derive positive and negative opinions, evaluations and emotions

SAS Sentiment Analysis’ high-performance crawler locates and extracts sentiment from digital content sources, including mainstream websites, social media outlets, internal servers and incoming news feeds. SAS’ unique hybrid approach combines powerful statistical techniques with linguistics rules to improve accuracy to the detailed feature level. It summarizes the sentiment expressed in all available text collections – identifying trends and creating graphical reports that describe the expressed feelings of consumers, partners, employees and competitors in real time. Output from SAS Sentiment Analysis can be stored in document repositories, surfaced in corporate portals and used as input to additional SAS Text Analytics software or search engines to help decision makers evaluate trends, predict future outcomes, minimize risks and capitalize on opportunities.

“SAS has automated the time-consuming process of reading individual documents and manually extracting relevant information,” said Fiona McNeill, Global Analytics Product Marketing Manager at SAS. “Our integrated analytics framework helps organizations maximize the value of information to improve their effectiveness.”

SAS Sentiment Analysis is included in the SAS Text Analytics suite, which helps organizations discover insights from electronic text materials, associate them for delivery to the right person or place, and provide intelligence to select the best course of action. Whether answering complex search-and-retrieval questions, ensuring appropriate content is presented to internal or external constituencies, or predicting which activity or channel will produce the best effect on existing sentiments, SAS Text Analytics provides exceptional real-time processing speeds for large volumes of text.

SAS Text Analytics solutions are part of the SAS Business Analytics Framework, backed by the industry’s most comprehensive range of consulting, training and support services, ensuring customers maximum return from their IT investments.

Recognizing vision

The Communications Solutions Product of the Year Award recognizes vision, leadership and thoroughness. The most innovative products and services brought to the market from March 2008 through March 2009 were chosen as winners of this Product of the Year Award and are published on the INTERNET TELEPHONY and Customer Interaction Solutions websites.

CommeRcial R- Integration in software

Some updates to R on the commercial side.

Revolution Computing is apparently now renamed Revolution Analytics. Hopefully this and the GUI development will help pay more focused attention on working in R in a mainstream office situation. I am still waiting for David Smith’s cheery hey-guys-we-changed-again blog post though at a new site called inside-r.org/ or his old blog site at blog.revolution-computing.com

They probably need to hire more people now – Curt Monash, noted all-things-data software guru has the inside dope here

Techworld writes more here at http://www.techworld.com.au/article/345288/startup_wants_r_alternative_ibm_sas

The company’s software is priced “aggressively” versus IBM and SAS. A single supported workstation costs $2,000 for an annual subscription. Pricing for server-based licenses varies depending on the implementation.

But Revolution Analytics faces a tough challenge from those larger vendors, as well as the likes of XLSolutions, which offers R training and a competing software package, R-Plus.

SPSS though continues to integrate R solidly and also march ahead with Python (which is likely to be the next gen in statistical programming if it keeps up) http://insideout.spss.com/

With the release of Version 18 of IBM SPSS Statistics and the Developer product, easy-to-install versions of the Python and R materials are posted.  In particular, look for the R Essentials link on the main page or from the Plugins page.  It installs the R Plugin, the correct version of R, and a bunch of example R integrations as bundles.  It’s much easier to get going with this now.

Netezza , a business intelligence vendor promises more integration and even a training in R based analytics here

R Modeling for TwinFin i-Class

Objective
Learn how to use TwinFin i-Class for scaling up the R language.

Description
In this class, you’ll learn how to use R to create models using huge data and how to create R algorithms that exploit our asymmetric massively parallel (AMPP®) architecture. Netezza has seamlessly integrated with R to offload the heavy lifting of the computational processing on TwinFin i-Class. This results in higher performance and increased scalability for R. Sign up for this class to learn how to take advantage of TwinFin i-Class for your R modeling. Topics include:

  1. R CRAN package installation on TwinFin i-Class
  2. Creating models using R on TwinFin i-Class
  3. Creating R algorithms for TwinFin i-Class

Format
Hands-on classroom lecture, lab exercises, tour

Audience
Knowledgeable R users – modelers, analytic developers, data miners

Course Length
0.5 day: 12pm-4pm Wednesday, June 23 OR 8am-12pm Thursday, June 24 OR 1pm-5pm Thursday, June 24, 2010

Delivery
Enzee Universe 2010, Boston, MA

Student Prerequisites

  • Working knowledge of R and parallel computing
  • Have analytic, compute-intensive challenges
  • Understanding of data mining and analytics”

My favourite GUI in stats , JMP (also from SAS Institute) is going to deploy R integration as soon as this September – Read more here- http://www.sas.com/news/preleases/JMP-to-R-integrationSGF10.html

Also SAS-IML studio is not lagging behind

The next release of SAS/IML will extend R integration to the server environment – enabling users to deploy results in batch mode and access R from SAS on additional platforms, such as UNIX and Linux.

I am kind of happy at one of the best GUI’s integrating with one of the most innovative stats softwares. It’s like two of your best friends getting married. (see screenshots of the softwares)

All in all- R as a platform making good overall progress from all sides of the corporate software spectrum which can only be good for R developers as well as users/students.

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