Data Mining

With the fourth post in this series I am going to talk about Hadoop – something with even more hype than R or predictive analytics. As we all know the era of Big Data has arrived. As anyone who reads the IT or business press knows, there is more data available today,  this data is no longer [...]

The third post in my series on standards in Predictive Analytics is on R, a hot topic in analytic circles these days. R is fundamentally an interpreted language for statistical computing and for the graphical display of results associated with these statistics. Highly extensible, it is available as free and open source software. The core environment [...]

Continuing my series on standards in Predictive Analytics I am going to talk first about PMML. PMML is an XML standard for the interchange of predictive analytic models developed by the Data Mining Group. The basic structure is an XML format document that contains a header, a data dictionary, data transformations and one or more models each [...]

IBM has recently released IBM SPSS Modeler 16 with three distinct packages: Professional with everything for structured data Premium adds text analytics, entity analytics and social network analysis Gold adds the Decision Management capabilities to the Premium package IBM SPSS Analytical Decision Management (ADM) will increasingly be included in the IBM SPSS Modeler Gold package [...]

I am working on a paper, for publication in early 2014, on the role of standards such as R, Hadoop and PMML in the mainstreaming of predictive analytics.  As I do so I will be publishing a few blog posts. I thought I would start with a quick introduction to the topic now and then [...]

I am giving the opening keynote for the BIWA Summit 2014 January 14-16, 2014 at the Oracle HQ Conference Center in Redwood Shores, CA. It’s an Oracle-focused event, obviously, with some novel and interesting use cases of Oracle Big Data, Exadata, Advanced Analytics/Data Mining, OBIEE, Spatial, Endeca and more. There are opportunities to get hands-on experience with products in [...]

I have been thinking about insurance claims processing a lot recently and working with a client to apply decision modeling to focus predictive analytics effectively in the claims process so this week’s white paper is Next Generation Claims Systems with Decision Management Decision Management delivers next generation claims systems that act immediately, increase agility, consistency and [...]

I last got an update on RapidMiner back in March 2012. The company was founded in 2007 and has 40 employees worldwide. The free product has reached 10,000 downloads a month and the product has some 35,000 active deployments with over 500 customers worldwide (40 added in the last 6 months). The company recently secured [...]

In the 9 months or so since I last wrote about Revolution Analytics they have released a new version of Revolution R Enterprise 7. This is focused on delivering “Write once deploy anywhere.” R, of course, continues to expand in popularity with the recent Rexer Data Mining survey (reviewed here) putting the percentage of data [...]

Karl Rexer just published his summary of this year’s Rexer Data Mining survey. As always there’s lots of good information but here are my favorite takeaways: As in our own work on Predictive Analytics in the Cloud, the survey fond that a focus on customers and on customer experience/engagement was top of mind. CRM/Marketing is [...]

This week’s white paper is Putting Predictive Analytics to Work We have recently updated this white paper on using Decision Management to make your operational systems analytical and improve customer treatment. Applying predictive analytics to operational decision making is the next wave of business innovation. Operational decisions drive interactions and determine the actions taken by [...]

I have been giving a class on Defining Business Goals for Predictive Analytics as part of the University of California Irvine Extension’s Predictive Analytics Certificate program. Predictive analytics can be used to seek out increasingly small margins and understand a company’s customers, products, channels, partners, and more. However, predictive analytics is only part of the [...]

There was a great article in Predictive Analytics Times recently by my friend Dean Abbott – A Good Business Objective Beats a Good Algorithm. Dean, like me, talks about the importance of the “three legged stool” of business, analytics and IT. But it was the title that particularly struck me. As Dean says, it’s easy to [...]

The old way: Big data is a hot topic. Big Data was coined as a term by Gartner to mean data that has Volume (more data), Variety (of many types) and Velocity (that arrives more rapidly). Value is extracted from big data using advanced analytics such as data mining and predictive analytics. This data can [...]

Neil focused his session on Analytics. Analytics, he says, has roared to the front office in recent years (driven in part by the explosion of data and data management technology). Big, as in Big Data, is relative. The rate of increase has not particularly changed in recent years but the rate of increase is being [...]

I am at Decision Camp today and Carole-Ann Matignon of Sparkling Logic kicked off the event talking about Decision Management. Carole-Ann and I have a lot of shared background in Decision Management so don’t expect any major disagreements… As readers of this blog know, Decision Management is an approach to automating and managing operational decisions. [...]

We recently released The Decision Management Manifesto. In previous posts I explained why we did this and why decisions are important. This week I want to talk about the technologies involved in Decision Management. Most organizations will find that adopting Decision Management requires them to adopt some new technologies. Managing and automating business decisions is different [...]

I am giving a webinar at 9am Pacific/Noon Eastern on November 20 on “The Decision Management Manifesto Explained” The Decision Management Manifesto lays out key principles of Decision Management. It explains why decisions are central to your requirements process and why you need to explicitly design decisions before applying technology. It lays out the core [...]

I am speaking at the Insurance Analytics Symposium this week so I thought I would post a link to a white paper relevant to the insurance industry – Next Generation Claims Systems with Decision Management. Decision Management delivers next generation claims systems that act immediately, increase agility, consistency and accuracy, improve customer satisfaction, speed response and [...]