Tag: use

Top 7 Business Strategy Models

UPDATED POST- Some Models I use for Business Strategy- to analyze the huge reams of qualitative and uncertain data that business generates. I have added a bonus the Business canvas Model (number 2)

  1. Porters 5 forces Model-To analyze industries
  2. Business Canvas
  3. BCG Matrix- To analyze Product Portfolios
  4. Porters Diamond Model- To analyze locations
  5. McKinsey 7 S Model-To analyze teams
  6. Gernier Theory- To analyze growth of organization
  7. Herzberg Hygiene Theory- To analyze soft aspects of individuals
  8. Marketing Mix Model- To analyze marketing mix.

Continue reading “Top 7 Business Strategy Models”

US Congress cedes cyber-war to Executive Branch

From–

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obama-ordered-wave-of-cyberattacks-against-iran.html?_r=2

Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran

By
Published: June 1, 2012

WASHINGTON — From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons,

From–

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0612/76973.html

Can the White House declare a cyberwar?

By JENNIFER MARTINEZ and JONATHAN ALLEN | 6/1/12
“When we see the results it’s pretty clear they’re doing it without anybody except a very few people knowing about it, much less having any impact on whether it’s happening or not,” said Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.).

McDermott is troubled because “we have given more and more power to the president, through the CIA, to carry out operations, and, frankly, if you go back in history, the reason we have problems with Iran is because the CIA brought about a coup.”

 

From–

http://www.house.gov/house/Constitution/Constitution.html

Article. I.

Section 1.

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

Section. 8.

The Congress shall have Power

—

Clause 11: To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

 

Related-

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/09/obama-wins-nobel-peace-pr_n_314907.html

Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize

KARL RITTER and MATT MOORE   10/ 9/09 11:02 PM ET

http://www.law.uchicago.edu/media

Statement Regarding Barack Obama 

The Law School has received many media requests about Barack Obama, especially about his status as “Senior Lecturer.”

From 1992 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004, Barack Obama served as a professor in the Law School. He was a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996. He was a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004, during which time he taught three courses per year.

 

Data Frame in Python

Exploring some Python Packages and R packages to move /work with both Python and R without melting your brain or exceeding your project deadline

—————————————

If you liked the data.frame structure in R, you have some way to work with them at a faster processing speed in Python.

Here are three packages that enable you to do so-

(1) pydataframe http://code.google.com/p/pydataframe/

An implemention of an almost R like DataFrame object. (install via Pypi/Pip: “pip install pydataframe”)

Usage:

        u = DataFrame( { "Field1": [1, 2, 3],
                        "Field2": ['abc', 'def', 'hgi']},
                        optional:
                         ['Field1', 'Field2']
                         ["rowOne", "rowTwo", "thirdRow"])

A DataFrame is basically a table with rows and columns.

Columns are named, rows are numbered (but can be named) and can be easily selected and calculated upon. Internally, columns are stored as 1d numpy arrays. If you set row names, they’re converted into a dictionary for fast access. There is a rich subselection/slicing API, see help(DataFrame.get_item) (it also works for setting values). Please note that any slice get’s you another DataFrame, to access individual entries use get_row(), get_column(), get_value().

DataFrames also understand basic arithmetic and you can either add (multiply,…) a constant value, or another DataFrame of the same size / with the same column names, like this:

#multiply every value in ColumnA that is smaller than 5 by 6.
my_df[my_df[:,'ColumnA'] < 5, 'ColumnA'] *= 6

#you always need to specify both row and column selectors, use : to mean everything
my_df[:, 'ColumnB'] = my_df[:,'ColumnA'] + my_df[:, 'ColumnC']

#let's take every row that starts with Shu in ColumnA and replace it with a new list (comprehension)
select = my_df.where(lambda row: row['ColumnA'].startswith('Shu'))
my_df[select, 'ColumnA'] = [row['ColumnA'].replace('Shu', 'Sha') for row in my_df[select,:].iter_rows()]

Dataframes talk directly to R via rpy2 (rpy2 is not a prerequiste for the library!)

 

(2) pandas http://pandas.pydata.org/

Library Highlights

  • A fast and efficient DataFrame object for data manipulation with integrated indexing;
  • Tools for reading and writing data between in-memory data structures and different formats: CSV and text files, Microsoft Excel, SQL databases, and the fast HDF5 format;
  • Intelligent data alignment and integrated handling of missing data: gain automatic label-based alignment in computations and easily manipulate messy data into an orderly form;
  • Flexible reshaping and pivoting of data sets;
  • Intelligent label-based slicing, fancy indexing, and subsetting of large data sets;
  • Columns can be inserted and deleted from data structures for size mutability;
  • Aggregating or transforming data with a powerful group by engine allowing split-apply-combine operations on data sets;
  • High performance merging and joining of data sets;
  • Hierarchical axis indexing provides an intuitive way of working with high-dimensional data in a lower-dimensional data structure;
  • Time series-functionality: date range generation and frequency conversion, moving window statistics, moving window linear regressions, date shifting and lagging. Even create domain-specific time offsets and join time series without losing data;
  • The library has been ruthlessly optimized for performance, with critical code paths compiled to C;
  • Python with pandas is in use in a wide variety of academic and commercial domains, including Finance, Neuroscience, Economics, Statistics, Advertising, Web Analytics, and more.

Why not R?

First of all, we love open source R! It is the most widely-used open source environment for statistical modeling and graphics, and it provided some early inspiration for pandas features. R users will be pleased to find this library adopts some of the best concepts of R, like the foundational DataFrame (one user familiar with R has described pandas as “R data.frame on steroids”). But pandas also seeks to solve some frustrations common to R users:

  • R has barebones data alignment and indexing functionality, leaving much work to the user. pandas makes it easy and intuitive to work with messy, irregularly indexed data, like time series data. pandas also provides rich tools, like hierarchical indexing, not found in R;
  • R is not well-suited to general purpose programming and system development. pandas enables you to do large-scale data processing seamlessly when developing your production applications;
  • Hybrid systems connecting R to a low-productivity systems language like Java, C++, or C# suffer from significantly reduced agility and maintainability, and you’re still stuck developing the system components in a low-productivity language;
  • The “copyleft” GPL license of R can create concerns for commercial software vendors who want to distribute R with their software under another license. Python and pandas use more permissive licenses.

(3) datamatrix http://pypi.python.org/pypi/datamatrix/0.8

datamatrix 0.8

A Pythonic implementation of R’s data.frame structure.

Latest Version: 0.9

This module allows access to comma- or other delimiter separated files as if they were tables, using a dictionary-like syntax. DataMatrix objects can be manipulated, rows and columns added and removed, or even transposed

—————————————————————–

Modeling in Python

Continue reading “Data Frame in Python”

JMP Student Edition

I really liked the initiatives at JMP/Academic. Not only they offer the software bundled with a textbook, which is both good common sense as well as business sense given how fast students can get confused

(Rant 1 Bundling with textbooks is something I think is Revolution Analytics should think of doing instead of just offering the academic  version for free downloading- it would be interesting to see the penetration of R academic market with Revolution’s version and the open source version with the existing strategy)

From http://www.jmp.com/academic/textbooks.shtml

Major publishers of introductory statistics textbooks offer a 12-month license to JMP Student Edition, a streamlined version of JMP, with their textbooks.

and a glance through this http://www.jmp.com/academic/pdf/jmp_se_comparison.pdf  shows it is a credible and not extremely whittled down version which would be just dishonest.

And I loved this Reference Card at http://www.jmp.com/academic/pdf/jmp10_se_quick_guide.pdf

 

Oracle, SAP- Hana, Revolution Analytics and even SAS/STAT itself can make more reference cards like this- elegant solutions for students and new learners!

More- creative-rants Honestly why do corporate sites use PDFs anymore when they can use Instapaper , or any of these SlideShare/Scribd formats to show information in a better way without diverting the user from the main webpage.

But I digress, back to JMP

 

Resources for Faculty Using JMP® Student Edition

Faculty who select a JMP Student Edition bundle for their courses may be eligible for additional resources, including course materials and training.

Special JMP® Student Edition for AP Statistics

JMP Student Edition is available in a convenient five-year license for qualified Advanced Placement statistics programs.

Try and have a look yourself at http://www.jmp.com/academic/student.shtml

 

 

 

Analytics 2012 Conference

from http://www.sas.com/events/analytics/us/index.html

Analytics 2012 Conference

SAS and more than 1,000 analytics experts gather at

Caesars Palace
Caesars Palace

Analytics 2012 Conference Details

Pre-Conference Workshops – Oct 7
Conference – Oct 8-9
Post-Conference Training – Oct 10-12
Caesars Palace, Las Vegas

Keynote Speakers

The following are confirmed keynote speakers for Analytics 2012. Jim Goodnight Since he co-founded SAS in 1976, Jim Goodnight has served as the company’s Chief Executive Officer.

William Hakes Dr. William Hakes is the CEO and co-founder of Link Analytics, an analytical technology company focused on mobile, energy and government verticals.

Tim Rey Tim Rey  has written over 100 internal papers, published 21 external papers, and delivered numerous keynote presentations and technical talks at various quantitative methods forums. Recently he has co-chaired both forecasting and data mining conferences. He is currently in the process of co-writing a book, Applied Data Mining for Forecasting.

http://www.sas.com/events/analytics/us/train.html

Pre-Conference

Plan to come to Analytics 2012 a day early and participate in one of the pre-conference workshops or take a SAS Certification exam. Prices for all of the preconference workshops, except for SAS Sentiment Analysis Studio: Introduction to Building Models and the Business Analytics Consulting Workshops, are included in the conference package pricing. You will be prompted to select your pre-conference training options when you register.

Sunday Morning Workshop

SAS Sentiment Analysis Studio: Introduction to Building Models

This course provides an introduction to SAS Sentiment Analysis Studio. It is designed for system designers, developers, analytical consultants and managers who want to understand techniques and approaches for identifying sentiment in textual documents.
View outline
Sunday, Oct. 7, 8:30a.m.-12p.m. – $250

Sunday Afternoon Workshops

Business Analytics Consulting Workshops

This workshop is designed for the analyst, statistician, or executive who wants to discuss best-practice approaches to solving specific business problems, in the context of analytics. The two-hour workshop will be customized to discuss your specific analytical needs and will be designed as a one-on-one session for you, including up to five individuals within your company sharing your analytical goal. This workshop is specifically geared for an expert tasked with solving a critical business problem who needs consultation for developing the analytical approach required. The workshop can be customized to meet your needs, from a deep-dive into modeling methods to a strategic plan for analytic initiatives. In addition to the two hours at the conference location, this workshop includes some advanced consulting time over the phone, making it a valuable investment at a bargain price.
View outline
Sunday, Oct. 7; 1-3 p.m. or 3:30-5:30 p.m. – $200

Demand-Driven Forecasting: Sensing Demand Signals, Shaping and Predicting Demand

This half-day lecture teaches students how to integrate demand-driven forecasting into the consensus forecasting process and how to make the current demand forecasting process more demand-driven.
View outline
Sunday, Oct. 7; 1-5 p.m.

Forecast Value Added Analysis

Forecast Value Added (FVA) is the change in a forecasting performance metric (such as MAPE or bias) that can be attributed to a particular step or participant in the forecasting process. FVA analysis is used to identify those process activities that are failing to make the forecast any better (or might even be making it worse). This course provides step-by-step guidelines for conducting FVA analysis – to identify and eliminate the waste, inefficiency, and worst practices from your forecasting process. The result can be better forecasts, with fewer resources and less management time spent on forecasting.
View outline
Sunday, Oct. 7; 1-5 p.m.

SAS Enterprise Content Categorization: An Introduction

This course gives an introduction to methods of unstructured data analysis, document classification and document content identification. The course also uses examples as the basis for constructing parse expressions and resulting entities.
View outline
Sunday, Oct. 7; 1-5 p.m.

Introduction to Data Mining and SAS Enterprise Miner

This course serves as an introduction to data mining and SAS Enterprise Miner for Desktop software. It is designed for data analysts and qualitative experts as well as those with less of a technical background who want a general understanding of data mining.
View outline
Sunday, Oct. 7, 1-5 p.m.

Modeling Trend, Cycles, and Seasonality in Time Series Data Using PROC UCM

This half-day lecture teaches students how to model, interpret, and predict time series data using UCMs. The UCM procedure analyzes and forecasts equally spaced univariate time series data using the unobserved components models (UCM). This course is designed for business analysts who want to analyze time series data to uncover patterns such as trend, seasonal effects, and cycles using the latest techniques.
View outline
Sunday, Oct. 7, 1-5 p.m.

SAS Rapid Predictive Modeler

This seminar will provide a brief introduction to the use of SAS Enterprise Guide for graphical and data analysis. However, the focus will be on using SAS Enterprise Guide and SAS Enterprise Miner along with the Rapid Predictive Modeling component to build predictive models. Predictive modeling will be introduced using the SEMMA process developed with the introduction of SAS Enterprise Miner. Several examples will be used to illustrate the use of the Rapid Predictive Modeling component, and interpretations of the model results will be provided.
View outline
Sunday, Oct. 7, 1-5 p.m

Obfuscate using Rapid Miner

ob·fus·cate/ˈäbfəˌskāt/

Verb:
  1. Render obscure, unclear, or unintelligible.
  2. Bewilder (someone).

A nice geeky function in Rapid Miner is the Obfuscator

This operator can be used to anonymize your data. It is possible to save the obfuscating map into a fi le which can be used to remap the old values and names. Please use the operator Deobfuscator for this

 

RapidMiner is free for download here (its open source)

http://rapid-i.com/content/view/26/201/

Using Rapid Miner and R for Sports Analytics #rstats

Rapid Miner has been one of the oldest open source analytics software, long long before open source or even analytics was considered a fashion buzzword. The Rapid Miner software has been a pioneer in many areas (like establishing a marketplace for Rapid Miner Extensions) and the Rapid Miner -R extension was one of the most promising enablers of using R in an enterprise setting.
The following interview was taken with a manager of analytics for a sports organization. The sports organization considers analytics as a strategic differentiator , hence the name is confidential. No part of the interview has been edited or manipulated.

Ajay- Why did you choose Rapid Miner and R? What were the other software alternatives you considered and discarded?

Analyst- We considered most of the other major players in statistics/data mining or enterprise BI.  However, we found that the value proposition for an open source solution was too compelling to justify the premium pricing that the commercial solutions would have required.  The widespread adoption of R and the variety of packages and algorithms available for it, made it an easy choice.  We liked RapidMiner as a way to design structured, repeatable processes, and the ability to optimize learner parameters in a systematic way.  It also handled large data sets better than R on 32-bit Windows did.  The GUI, particularly when 5.0 was released, made it more usable than R for analysts who weren’t experienced programmers.

Ajay- What analytics do you do think Rapid Miner and R are best suited for?

 Analyst- We use RM+R mainly for sports analysis so far, rather than for more traditional business applications.  It has been quite suitable for that, and I can easily see how it would be used for other types of applications.

 Ajay- Any experiences as an enterprise customer? How was the installation process? How good is the enterprise level support?

Analyst- Rapid-I has been one of the most responsive tech companies I’ve dealt with, either in my current role or with previous employers.  They are small enough to be able to respond quickly to requests, and in more than one case, have fixed a problem, or added a small feature we needed within a matter of days.  In other cases, we have contracted with them to add larger pieces of specific functionality we needed at reasonable consulting rates.  Those features are added to the mainline product, and become fully supported through regular channels.  The longer consulting projects have typically had a turnaround of just a few weeks.

 Ajay- What challenges if any did you face in executing a pure open source analytics bundle ?

Analyst- As Rapid-I is a smaller company based in Europe, the availability of training and consulting in the USA isn’t as extensive as for the major enterprise software players, and the time zone differences sometimes slow down the communications cycle.  There were times where we were the first customer to attempt a specific integration point in our technical environment, and with no prior experiences to fall back on, we had to work with Rapid-I to figure out how to do it.  Compared to the what traditional software vendors provide, both R and RM tend to have sparse, terse, occasionally incomplete documentation.  The situation is getting better, but still lags behind what the traditional enterprise software vendors provide.

 Ajay- What are the things you can do in R ,and what are the things you prefer to do in Rapid Miner (comparison for technical synergies)

Analyst- Our experience has been that RM is superior to R at writing and maintaining structured processes, better at handling larger amounts of data, and more flexible at fine-tuning model parameters automatically.  The biggest limitation we’ve had with RM compared to R is that R has a larger library of user-contributed packages for additional data mining algorithms.  Sometimes we opted to use R because RM hadn’t yet implemented a specific algorithm.  The introduction the R extension has allowed us to combine the strengths of both tools in a very logical and productive way.

In particular, extending RapidMiner with R helped address RM’s weakness in the breadth of algorithms, because it brings the entire R ecosystem into RM (similar to how Rapid-I implemented much of the Weka library early on in RM’s development).  Further, because the R user community releases packages that implement new techniques faster than the enterprise vendors can, this helps turn a potential weakness into a potential strength.  However, R packages tend to be of varying quality, and are more prone to go stale due to lack of support/bug fixes.  This depends heavily on the package’s maintainer and its prevalence of use in the R community.  So when RapidMiner has a learner with a native implementation, it’s usually better to use it than the R equivalent.