analysis

Is Machine Learning v Domain expertise the wrong question?

April 5, 2012

KDNuggets had an interesting poll this week in which readers expressed themselves as Skeptical of Machine Learning replacing Domain Expertise. This struck me not because I disagree but because I think it is in some ways the wrong question:

Any given decision is made based on a combination of information, know-how and pre-cursor decisions.
The know-how can be [...]

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First Look – Pervasive RushAnalyzer

March 29, 2012

Pervasive is best known for its data integration products but has recently been developing and releasing a series of products focused on analytics. RushAnalyzer is a combination of the KNIME data mining workbench (reviewed here) and Pervasive DataRush, a platform for parallelization and automatic scaling of data manipulation and analysis (reviewed here).
In the combined product, [...]

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First Look – Rapid Insight Analytics

March 28, 2012

Rapid Insight was founded 10 years ago to develop tools that were easier for analysts to use to quickly extract meaning from data. Rapid Insight has been focused in higher education until recently and is expanding into fund raising and other areas. Rapid Insight Analytics is a pure data mining or predictive analytic workbench designed [...]

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First Look – Rapid-I

March 27, 2012

Rapid-I provides open source software for predictive analytics, data mining and text mining. Incorporated in 2006, they are based in Dortmund Germany and have been working on RapidMiner since 2001. They have over 35,000 production deployments and more than 400 customers in 40 countries. Banking and financial services is their largest market followed by Pharma [...]

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Live Event: IBM IMPACT – From Business Rules to a Decision-Centric Organization

March 26, 2012

[ April 30, 2012; 3:45 pm to 5:00 pm. ] Session 2420 at IBM’s IMPACT is titled “From Business Rules to a Decision-Centric Organization” and is being presented jointly by me and a client of mine – Gagan Saxena of Apple Vacations.
Apple Vacations is expanding its B2C business by improving consumer experience, adding intelligent personalization and dynamically creating product packages – a dramatic shift from [...]

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Pushing the frontiers of analytics #smarteranalytics

March 20, 2012

Brenda Dietrich from IBM research wrapped up the morning with a discussion of some of IBM’s research. This involved both managing uncertain data at scale and driving analytics for this data. Projects cover systems of people, the future Watson, Outcome-based business and resilient business and services.
As everyone knows there’s a lot more data out there [...]

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Smarter Analytics Leadership Summit Opening #smarteranalytics

March 20, 2012

Steve Mills kicked off the IBM Smarter Analytics Leadership Summit. Business Analytics matter, he says, as shown by the focus of CEOs (8 out of 10 expect complexity to increase, enterprises applying analytics are more successful etc). The need for analytics is pervasive, with every industry seeing a massive expansion in the volume of data [...]

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Optimization and simulation in Decision Management Technologies

March 15, 2012

As you probably know by now, we have released the first version of our Decision Management Systems Platform Technology report. This report is available free for download from http://www.decisionmanagementsolutions.com/decision-management-technology. This version of the report focuses on four key areas (outlined in the webinar we gave recently and available in our archive here). One of these [...]

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Embedding predictive analytics in Decision Management Technologies

March 13, 2012

We recently released the first version of our Decision Management Systems Platform Technology report. This report is available free for download from http://www.decisionmanagementsolutions.com/decision-management-technology. This version of the report focuses on four key areas (outlined in the webinar we gave recently and available in our archive here). One of these areas is embedding predictive analytics. For [...]

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Book Review: Knowledge Automation: How to implement Decision Management in Business Processes

March 13, 2012

Some time ago I got a pre-release copy of Knowledge Automation: How to Implement Decision Management in Business Processes, Alan Fish’s new book on the analysis and design techniques of decision management. I was delighted to write a foreword for Alan and with the arrival of a printed copy I wanted to extend this with [...]

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First Look – Dymatrix DynaMine

March 6, 2012

Dymatrix started in 2000 as a spinout from Computer Sciences Corporation. Focused on analytical CRM and campaign management they have done many projects and identified a number of challenges in the use of predictive analytic models. They have customers across utilities, retail, telecommunications, banking, insurance and life sciences. This work led to the development of [...]

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Decisions, rulesets and business rules revisited

February 28, 2012

Some time back I wrote Here’s how decisions and rules relate (and how to manage them) and it seemed to me that this could do with being repeated with small updates.
One of the questions I get often is around how decisions and business rules relate. Business rules are, after all, one of the core technologies for [...]

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Enabling Business Analytics at SAS – Business Visualization

February 27, 2012

Four themes in business visualization:

Consumer-oriented BI
Walk up and use, understanding through visualization, self-service
Deriving value from big data
Analytics and visualization that scales with in-memory
Approachable analytics
Integration into the user’s world
Outlook, Office, mobile

The new product (coming in March) has four components:

Environment Manager for setup and monitoring
Visual Analytics Explorer for ad-hoc analysis and discovery
Visual Design for report design (web or [...]

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Enabling Business Analytics at SAS – High Performance Analytics

February 27, 2012

High Performance Analytics first. As already noted this is a key focus area for SAS. The three pillars, remember, are:

Grid Computing
Allocating out analytic tasks to multiple processors and cores in a managed fashion.
In-Database Analytics
Using database servers for analytic computing to minimize data movement and improve performance.
In-Memory Analytics
The key area in many ways for highest end [...]

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SAS Executive Viewpoint 2012

February 27, 2012

Dr Goodnight kicked it off the executive viewpoint at the 2012 SAS Inside Intelligence session. SAS had another growth year in 2011 ($2.7B and growth of 12.1%) as Jim highlighted both its continued investment in new buildings around the world and the fact that many SAS locations around the world, and SAS overall, continue to [...]

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First Look – FICO Model Central

February 16, 2012

FICO Model Central is the latest addition to FICO’s Decision Management platform and is focused on lifecycle management of predictive analytic models in the context of an overall Decision Management implementation. The original driver was a growing regulatory requirement in the banking industry to have a regular cycle of model validation and monitoring of predictive [...]

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First Look – USoft

February 14, 2012

USoft has been a vendor in the Decision Management space for a while. They started as Comtecno in 1986, become part of Unisys in 1995 then Ness Benelux in 1999 before returning to their current status as an independent Dutch software company in 2010 as USoft B.V. The software has had a much more consistent [...]

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Rules Developer/Junior Developer position in Louisville, KY

February 7, 2012

Brooksource in Louisville, KY is searching for a Rules Management Developer for a Fortune 100 client in the healthcare industry. This position is within the Clinical Guidance group and they are seeking someone that has a development background and has experience working with the business side of the house. This is a unique position that has [...]

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First Look – StatSoft STATISTICA

January 31, 2012

StatSoft was founded in 1984 and started building statistical software when it first became practical to deliver on the PC. STATISTICA is an enterprise predictive analytics platform on the Windows platform with role-based access, connections to the various data sources that companies have and support for data exploration through to deployment. The product has four [...]

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Some thoughts on decision terminology

January 30, 2012

An interesting thread over on LinkedIn got into a discussion of terminology and I thought I would share my opinion on this here:

Decision Management is an approach for supporting, automating, managing and improving decisions.

Decision Management Systems are systems that automate and manage repeatable decisions.
Decision Support Systems support people manage decisions, both repeatable and one-off.

To build [...]

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