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Rattle Redux and Predictive Analytics World Potpourri

Steve Miller
Information Management Blogs, March 2, 2009

Rattle

I received an email from John Maindonald the other day. A little over a year ago, I wrote a review of an excellent statistical text, Data Analysis and Graphics Using R, John co-authored with John Braun. Part of his message was to inform that the 3rd edition of Data Analysis would be coming out soon. Maindonald is also on the faculty of the Australian National University, co-teaching a course on data mining with Graham Williams. Williams is the developer of Rattle, the R Analytical Tool To Learn Easily, a front end to the significant machine learning/data mining capabilities of R. The second piece of John’s message was a request to update the url to the course for Information Management readers. Done. I would highly recommend Math3346 for those seeking an accessible treatment of applied data mining.

Predictive Analytics World

As I mentioned in last week’s blogs, I was pleasantly surprised by version one of Predictive Analytics World, finding it quite useful on a number of levels. Today, I offer a few final observations on the conference.

I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised that the most oft-cited success (or risk) factors for analytics deployments have to do not with analytics per se, but rather with business sponsorship, business/IT/analytics team alignment, methodology, data quality, communication, incremental wins, and governance. It appears lessons learned for predictive analytics look much like those for broader business intelligence.

On the evening of Wednesday, Feb 18, The Bay Area useR Group (R Programming Language), held its meeting using PAW hotel facilities. 70 people, many of whom were not R users, listened to presentations by commercial R vendor Revolution Computing as well as web titans Facebook and Google. Both Facebook and Google are big advocates of R’s open source analytics and graphical capabilities, employing analysts who learned the package in grad school. R is particularly popular for preliminary, exploratory data analysis (EDA) tasks.

I was a bit surprised by the limited range of analytics techniques demonstrated in the technical sessions I attended. Logistic regression and CART seemed the norm for classification problems, while ordinary least squares and stepwise regression appeared the choice for interval-level prediction. One session presented a hand-rolled ensemble of logistic regressions, demonstrating reduced variance and sharpened predictions – results R users take for granted with Random Forests and Gradient Boosting. Maybe I’m just spoiled by the embarrassment of riches available to predictive modelers in R. There are now scores of the very latest techniques accessible for free.

The Bay area is home to the top two schools of statistics in the U.S., Stanford and Cal Berkeley. It’d been nice to have an academic perspective on the current state of predictive analytics, especially given the rapid developments in both statistics and machine learning. One of the Stanford professors among Trevor Hastie, Rob Tibshirani, or Jerome Friedman, co-authors of the just-released book, The Elements of Statistical Learning, Second Edition, would have been an ideal presenter. Perhaps next year there can be sessions surveying both statistical learning and Bayes modeling.

Looking forward to PAW 2010!

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As I have dug into improving customer satisfaction, the question I ask myself is that although this seems like a laudable target, is it really?

Will Google Gobble Web Analytics?

The short answer is yes and it's surprising the titan of search hasn't done so already

Information Builders Rocks Nashville with Business Intelligence and More

At the Information Builders 2009 Summit in Nashville music and technology came together to present innovation and practical use of BI and information-enabling technologies

The Hawthorne Effect – or Not

I was pretty distraught over a column I recently read in the Economist. The article, Light Work, challenges the legacy of the Hawthorne effect

MicroStrategy’s Big Picture

With official release of free reporting suite, the BI vendor offers a clever reverse consolidation path for customers

BI Mashup Maturity Model? Oxymoron? Au Contraire Mon Frère!

Forrester has developed a maturity model for enterprise adoption of mashup-style, self-service development of business intelligence applications

No Data Warehouse Required: BI Reporting Extends Its Reach

The dirty little secret in most companies is that the BI reporting team has morphed into a de-facto enterprise reporting team

IT Should be an Enabler to the Business

Let’s start with my basic opinion: IT is not the business, it is an enabler

Analytical Designs for BI – Part 2

Quasi-experimental studies attempt to control potential confounding variables by clever design techniques and statistical adjustment

Coca-Cola Goes Freestyle

RFID-powered vending machines that let customers mix their own water, juices and sodas hoped to provide data for new product introductions

SPSS: Analytics Force in Customer Experience Management

Behind a fairly generic name is SPSS's new version of their enterprise feedback management technology, which in my opinion is one of the key supporting technologies providing customer feedback management

Pitney Bowes Introduces Portfolio of Business Insights Technology

After a day behind closed doors with executives I got a deeper appreciate for the portfolio of technologies today and in the future

Analytical Designs for BI – Part 1

I must admit I'm obsessed with BI designs for business performance measurement

When Will Eco Apps Go Mainstream?

Examples of transaction and performance management based systems to manage Eco Footprint are showing up in Europe; vendors will be ready to deliver products stateside as regulations call for

Database Religions Dissolve Into The Big Billowing Virtual Data Cloud

Virtualization is a venerable old computing concept that has achieved new life in recent years

Convergence of SOA and BI

The IT community has sensed a need for consistent terms. I propose we start a process to keep us all sane and volunteer to head the IEEE, ANSI or other committee

Social Science Statistics Blog and BI – Nonrandomized Experiments

I came across an intriguing blog entry that raised issues pertinent to business and business intelligence

Things I Need to Do My Job

The tyranny of technology moves slowly and leaves the best bits behind for a longer run than people appreciate

The Rise of the Columnar Database

The more this space matures, the more evident it becomes that analytics is a perfect match for column-based database architectures

Information Post-Discovery - Latest BI Trend

This is yet another proof – and I’ll never get tired of saying this – that BI market is as vibrant, exciting and far from commoditization as ever

Quantitative Social Science and BI

I find the intersection of the social and quantitative sciences of particular interest – and pertinence for BI

BI Search is Back (and Better)

Molson Coors has been testing SAP’s Business Objects Explorer release and they really like it

MDM and M&A

Corporate restructuring isn’t just a financial challenge. It includes realignment of marketing activities, sales and operational issues

Bayes and BI

The current ascendance of Bayesian analysis in the statistical world is, I believe, a boon for BI

Imagine How the Business Feels

A service-based architecture requires information abstraction using metadata, whereas Web services do not use common metadata

Bundled BI Bargains

Have a closer look at how consolidation and product maturity are paying off now for businesses with stalled IT budgets; you may already be a winner

Self-Service Business Intelligence Depends On Automated Data Discovery

The ball’s in IBM’s rivals’ courts regarding whether, when and how they plan to add automated source discovery to their BI portfolios

OpenBI Travels II: R/Finance 2009, Chicago

I received an email from Mike Driscoll, co-chair of the Bay Area R Users Group, announcing the formation of three new groups – Los Angeles, New York and Ottawa

AARP Says I’m Special

Just another data quality failure from the annals of direct marketing, or am I missing the point?

Confusing Business

We in IT struggle with understanding the business – or is it the business that struggles with explaining themselves (and their needs or requirements) to IT

Missing Out due to Travel Restrictions?

Corporate travel budgets have been slashed, but what are the long-term effects of less opportunity

OpenBI Travels I: MySQL Conference and the Oracle Acquisition of Sun

There was no shortage of strong reaction at the MySQL conference to the acquisition of Sun. Open source purists were incensed

Make the Whirl Go Away

What’s really going on with advances in solid-state disk drives and how far will it go?

Oracle’s Sun Acquisition Accelerates Push Into Data Warehousing Appliances

Oracle is acquiring longtime partner Sun Microsystems, putting the software powerhouse fully into the hardware business - and hitting the DW industry like an earthquake

Your Company’s Data Supply Chain

We’ve been talking for several years about the concept of a data supply chain. But IT executives are only now starting to catch on to its importance

Free BI is Still No Free Lunch

There are few truly zero cost alternatives to BI tools, but there are some

More Statistical Learning

The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference and Prediction, Second Edition, by Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani and Jerome Friedman is now available

What About Architecture Anyway?

Confusion about services-based architectures has been created by a number of industry elements

Architecture as an Asset

We need to consider enterprise architecture not as a hindrance, but as an asset to the IT organization and to the business that we are enabling

The R Statistical Learning Lasso

The R user community had just been provided access to a latest learning algorithm hot off the development presses from three world-renowned practitioners – for free

Dislocation Intelligence in a Brutal Economy

We as a country should try to smooth over these economic dislocations so that they don’t completely wipe some places off the map

Health Care Industry BI Groundhog Day

On my way back home from www.himss.org show in Chicago, I have a creepy feeling of déjà vu. Even worse, it feels like the movie Groundhog Day where the main character keeps waking up on the same day, same date, never able to get to tomorrow

Performance Goals and Compensation

Why business rarely ties outcomes to job success for managers, and, if the New York Yankees are baseball’s AIG, why don’t we hate them?

Blurring the Line Between SOA and BI

I recently read an article in the Microsoft Architect Journal on so-called service-oriented business intelligence or, as the article’s authors call it, SoBI

Data Vu All Over Again

No sweat I thought. We’ve honed our expertise on open source BI in the cloud. We’ve performed this drill several times already. Alas, not so fast ...

Inmon’s Vitriolic Slap At “Virtual Data Warehousing” Does Not Withstand Scrutiny

Bill Inmon treats data federation as mutually exclusive from enterprise data warehousing, when in fact they are highly complementary approaches

Gathering of Clouds

With hype contained, developments in cloud computing are on display at conference

The Divine R

A colleague recently asked me for a good introductory text on the R statistical computing platform. Though there are a seemingly endless number of published books on R, I recommended a personal favorite

Not MDM, Not Data Governance: Data Management

Has everyone forgotten database development fundamentals?

After So Many Years Of Ballyhoo, Semantic Web Still Searching For Killer App

Cynics might call Semantic Web a technology looking for a solution. And they might have a point

Basketball Diaries

Lessons from the NCAA tournament coverage; don't drop the ball on Web content management

Hypothesize/Experiment/Learn/Nudge

Nudge is a concept derived from behavioral economics. It denotes a gentle “push” or incentive to coax decision-makers to choose a preferred option from a series of alternatives

Lean Information Management Strategies for Lean Times

When the going gets tough, the tough get lean, focused, and flexible. To help organizations survive the bad times and thrive in all climates, their information management initiatives must remain agile and adaptable

Are There BI Implications In The Rumored IBM/Sun Merger? You Betcha!

I always predicted that Open Source BI has to reach critical mass before it becomes a viable alternative for large enterprise BI platforms

Hypothesize/Experiment/Learn

I’ve subscribed to the Harvard Business Review for years. It seems there are either several articles pertinent for BI or none at all. The February 2009 edition was the former

Enjoy the Chicken (and then Get Back to Work)

Reflecting on a conference, same as it ever was and still relevant

Yawn! Business Process Visions Consistent Over The Years

A couple of nights ago, I found my handwritten notes from 1997, summarizing a literature search I was doing at that time while authoring my first book, the IDG Books title “Workflow Strategies.” Reading the prettier handwriting of a 12-years-younger Jim Kobielus, I was struck by how little has changed since then

The Flaw of the Hub-and-Spoke Architecture

I recently talked to a client who was fixated on a hub-and-spoke solution to support his company’s analytical applications. In the world of software and data, the one thing I’ve learned is that there are no absolutes. And there’s no such thing as a universal architecture

Planning for Predictive Models – Wisdom From Regression Modeling Strategies

The following are nuggets of wisdom from RMS for planning/executing modeling studies, along with a statistical blogger’s commentary

Riding the Content Technology Train

You’ll know content vendors at a glance with this clever subway map; also, Skittles turns Web site over to those crazy social networkers

BI Nirvana

I had an amazing client experience. I searched long and hard for a client with flawless, 100 percent efficient and effective BI environment and applications. Imagine my utter and absolute amazement when I stumbled on one

Retrospect or Hindsight

Why we're bad at benchmarking BI failures

Predictive Analytics World – Methodology and Business Learning

Steve Miller's thoughts his trip to Predictive Analytics World

Learning from the Black Swan

Nassim Nicholas Taleb was right. The world financial system was devastated by unpredicted catastrophes of grand proportion – a financial black swan

Whatever Happened To EII?

Some integration approaches developed into multibillion dollar standalone markets. But others, while valuable, haven't survived as well. EII is one example

What, If Anything, Is A "Niche Vendor," Where Enterprise Data Warehousing Is Concerned?

No matter how carefully one words a report, there is always the potential for misunderstanding

SOA Mandates Data Management

Everyone thinks that SOA is an integration framework. In fact it’s a means of remotely accessing other systems and their related information without having to know the details

Kickin IT Old School

Goes around, comes around; back office meets its match in tech-savvy users

Operational BI From the Trenches

As with any other current buzzword, the world seems to be piling on and the meaning of operational BI seems to be is evolving (or eroding)

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