53 articles in this selection

2012/03/02

2011/08/31

QuickStart guide to OpenAmplify's sentiment analysis API.

2011/06/09

API for sentiment analysis

2010/12/22

The Joy Of Stats will take you on a fascinating journey into the world of statistics - and the remarkable power they have to change our understanding of the world we live in.

2010/11/17

Connecticut software developer Jake Luciani has run 10k items on Del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit and Mixx through the API of popularity ranking engine AideRSS to analyze the connection between popularity and timing. He determined the best days and times for a blog post to be submitted to those sites if its author wants it to receive the maximum number of votes, comments and inbound links....

2010/11/13

Google Refine is a power tool for working with messy data sets, including cleaning up inconsistencies, transforming them from one format into another, and extending them with new data from external web services or other databases. Version 2.0 introduces a new extensions architecture, a reconciliation framework for linking records to other databases (like Freebase), and a ton of new transformation commands and expressions....

2010/11/11

An excellent post on decisionstats.com in response to Jason Stamper’s CBR interview with SAS CEO Jim Goodnight highlights some issues that arise when you try to compare open source, commercial open source, and proprietary software in the marketplace. The issues arise because the economics of the offerings are so different that traditional measures don’t work as well as they used to. As pointed out on decisionstats the commercial open source offerings (as yet) don’t amount to much when you compare revenue $ on paper....

2010/11/03

Online travel firm Expedia has found that data analytics can deliver a multi-million dollar kick to a company's bottom line. The company used SAS analytics to identify a single change to a web page that generated an overnight surge in sales, Expedia's VP of global analytics and optimisation Joe Megibow told the SAS Premier Business Leadership Series conference in Las Vegas last week....

2010/10/31

Research results about the use of data mining software.

2010/10/30

All in all, QlikView 10 offers some incremental improvements in important areas such as ease of use and performance. The new version is available immediately so you can download and try it yourself and get access to documentation and videos of demos and how to use it. In the future, it would be nice if you didn’t even need to download it – maybe the next version we can simply run in the cloud. Now QlikView has to continue its growth, expand its presence in the lines of business and use its new release as an opportunity to grow its market share....

2010/10/17

A wide range of tools is available with which users can analyze their data stored in data warehouses and production databases. These tools range from straightforward reporting tools via interactive online analytical processing tools to advanced statistical tools. All these tools help users in some way to improve their business operations and business decisions. They help by presenting data in a textual or graphical way by summarizing data, by grouping data, or by making predictions. But there are things most of these tools can’t do, and that is analyze data when it’s structured as a graph or network and when that data must be analyzed by traversing the graph....

2010/10/09

How to do decile analysis in QlikView

2010/10/07

Not all customers are equally profitable, nor do they all have the potential to become your most profitable customers - this is a fundamental tenet of CRM. This section hopes to help you identify your most profitable customers. We cover methodologies for categorizing customers and focusing on those who make the largest contributions to your bottom line; and how to analyze your CRM and Marketing campaigns - both off-line and online....

2010/10/05

Data journalism trainer and writer Paul Bradshaw explains how to get started in data journalism, from getting to the data to visualising it.

2010/10/05

In my interactions with the world at large (mostly online) in the ways of data, statistics and analytics- I come across people who like to call themselves analysts.

2010/10/01

If you are in any way participant in intelligence projects from an end user or consultant perspective (BI, CI, MI or whatever I) you will most likely also participate in the process of information analysis. Previously, we have defined this as the process of gathering both information needs and functional (and non-functional) requirements. I’ve seen many many posts about interview techniques and presentation techniques and the more I read about it, the more I come to the conclusion that those are merely tools, and not even the most important ones. No, information analysis is Art. And it was not his brush that made Rembrandt one of the biggest painters of his time....

2010/09/27

Kaplan and Narayanan (2001) bring the 20/80 rule to a new level, where they suggest that by performing a whale curve analysis, you may find the most profitable 20% of your customers bring in between 150% and 300% of your total profits.

2010/08/30

Systems thinking is the process of understanding how things influence one another within a whole. In nature, systems thinking examples include ecosystems in which various elements such as air, water, movement, plants, and animals work together to survive or perish. In organizations, systems consist of people, structures, and processes that work together to make an organization healthy or unhealthy. Systems thinking has been defined as an approach to problem solving, by viewing "problems" as parts of an overall system, rather than reacting to specific part, outcomes or events and potentially contributing to further development of unintended consequences. Systems thinking is not one thing but a set of habits or practices [1] within a framework that is based on the belief that the component parts of a system can best be understood in the context of relationships with each other and with other systems, rather than in isolation. Systems thinking focuses on cyclical rather than linear cause...

2010/08/24

Welcome to the Digital Methods course, which is a focused section of the more expansive Digital Methods wiki. The Digital Methods course consists of seven units with digital research protocols, specially developed tools, tutorials as well as sample projects. In particular this course is dedicated to how else links, Websites, engines and other digital objects and spaces may be studied, if methods were to follow the medium, as opposed to importing standard methods from the social sciences more generally, including surveys, interviews and observation. Here digital methods are central. Short literature reviews are followed by distinctive digital methods approaches, step-by-step guides and exemplary projects....

2010/08/20

I've stopped reading about 80% of the blogs I was subscribed to because I came to the conclusion that there wasn't enough useful content in them. In fact, many of them were not much more than self-promotion and unfounded opinion. Those are the easy ones to spot. But there is a bigger problem....

2010/08/03

Welcome to The Pac-Man Dossier! This web page is dedicated to providing Pac-Man players of all skill levels with the most complete and detailed study of the game possible. New discoveries found during the research for this page in December 2008 have allowed for the clearest view yet of the actual ghost behavior and pathfinding logic used by the game. Laid out in hyperlinked chapters and sections, the dossier is easy to navigate using the Table of Contents below, or you can read it in linear fashion from top-to-bottom. Chapter 1 is purely the backstory of Namco and Pac-Man's designer, Toru Iwatani, chronicling the development cycle and release of the arcade classic. If you want to get right to the technical portions of the document, however, feel free to skip ahead to Chapter 2 and start reading there. Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 are dedicated to explaining pathfinding logic and discussions of unique ghost behavior. Chapter 5 is dedicated to the “split screen” level, and several Appendices...

2010/07/28

The BI industry has always failed to understand and support its real customers. With few exceptions, BI product vendors and consultancies continue to be acquainted primarily with IT. This is a comfortable, compatible relationship, for BI and IT both tend to see the world from an engineering-oriented, techno-centric perspective. But the BI industry’s real customers are the folks who actually use BI tools to transform data into the meaningful information they need to make better decisions. Although some of these folks work in IT, most do not. Most are not software engineers. Most are not technologists. Most are people who have a job to do that requires an awareness of what’s going on and how they might influence it, which is primarily gleaned from data. To do this, they need tools that enlighten....

2010/04/24

Virustotal is a service that analyzes suspicious files and facilitates the quick detection of viruses, worms, trojans, and all kinds of malware detected by antivirus engines

2010/04/20

I spent an hour or so browsing the QlikTech S-1 and thought I’d share some observations.

2009/06/16

Nathan Yau, the statistician beind data blog Flowing Data, presents his guide to what you can do with all those numbers

2009/06/09

Even the tiniest amount of empirical facts (say, observing 2 users) vastly improves the probability of making correct UI design decisions.

2009/05/27

2009/05/20

The only metrics that entrepreneurs should invest energy in collecting are those that help them make decisions. Unfortunately, the majority of data available in off-the-shelf analytics packages are what I call Vanity Metrics. They might make you feel good, but they don’t offer clear guidance for what to do....

2009/05/20

A cohort study or panel study is a form of longitudinal study used in medicine and social science. It is one type of study design and should be compared with a cross-sectional study.

2009/05/20

A QlikView demo that can be used to analyse expenses of MP's.

2009/05/12

With SAP BusinessObjects Explorer in the cloud you can visually explore and analyze your Excel spreadsheets. Use Explorer in the cloud with financial data, catalogs, customer lists, music libraries, and many other types of data. Simply upload your Excel file, and you'll be looking at your data in a whole new way....

2009/04/30

Web analytics databases are getting even larger. eBay now has a 6 1/2 petabyte warehouse running on Greenplum — user data — to go with its more established 2 1/2 petabyte Teradata system. Between the two databases, the metrics are enormous — 17 trillion rows, 150 billion new rows per day, millions of queries per day, and so on. Meanwhile, Facebook has 2 1/2 petabytes managed by Hadoop, not running on a conventional DBMS at all, Yahoo has over a petabyte (on a homegrown system), and Fox/MySpace has two different multi-hundred terabyte systems (Greenplum and Aster Data nCluster). eBay and Fox are the two Greenplum customers I wrote in about last August, when they both seemed to be headed to the petabyte range in a hurry. These are basically all web log/clickstream databases, except that network event data is even more voluminous than the pure clickstream stuff....

2009/04/21

To me, the great and more rewarding challenge in Twitter analytics is to synthesize the substance of those conversations. Imagine if you went to a party and could overhear everything that everyone else was saying. Who talked the most and who had the greatest audience is less interesting than what topics people were discussing and what was said. I wanted to take a shot at this type of Twitter analytics....

2009/04/15

Spotfire's interactive information visualization and analytic solutions give users a remarkable experience for quickly and easily querying data and reporting results for superior business intelligence. From portfolio management and customer retention programs to key processes such as CRM, marketing, research, bioinformatics, yield and asset management and design for manufacturing, enterprises around the world rely on Spotfire's business analytics software to improve operational performance....

2009/03/23

Visualization and analysis software. Developed in cooperation with the Technical University Eindhoven.

2009/03/13

Good Data provides a simple and easy-to-use service to view, analyze and report on the data that drives your business. All in a secure online space without the typical costs and headaches.

2009/03/05

SaaS Business Intelligence provider, looks ok, but not too impressive.

2009/03/02

Crowd Science Demographics is a new analytics service that builds detailed reports on the demographics and attitudes of website audiences. By surveying a small number visitors with carefully constructed questionnaires, Crowd Science Demographics is able to build comprehensive profiles that give publishers a deep understanding of their audience....

2009/02/24

ProM is an extensible framework that supports a wide variety of process mining techniques in the form of plug-ins. It is platform independent as it is implemented in Java, and can be downloaded free of charge.

2009/02/23

From The Age newspaper in Australia, via Drive.com.au, comes this surprising, sobering “anatomy of a crash,” the car in question being the 5-star Ford Falcon (the one made in Australia, not the one your father had when he was young). The article leads by noting: “Survivors of serious car crashes often say time appears to slow down in the moments around the impact and that they can recall the event in extraordinary detail.” (and somehow the images we always see of crash-test dummies in slow motion tends to reinforce that)....

2009/02/13

PivotLink delivers on the original promise of business intelligence by enabling anyone in your organization to make smarter and faster business decisions. As the leading provider of SaaS business intelligence solutions our innovative approach gives users the freedom to explore and analyze their information so that they can better meet the demands of today's rapidly changing business environment....

2009/02/13

GGobi is an open source visualization program for exploring high-dimensional data. It provides highly dynamic and interactive graphics such as tours, as well as familiar graphics such as the scatterplot, barchart and parallel coordinates plots. Plots are interactive and linked with brushing and identification....

2009/02/11

Piwik is a downloadable, open source (GPL licensed) web analytics software program. It provides you with detailed reports on your website visitors: the search engines and keywords they used, the language they speak, your popular pages… and so much more....

2009/02/09

DecisionIris is an interactive data visualization enterprise-wide solution that enables you to discover new insights in the information you work with every day. The DecisionIris platform enables your organization to easily deploy intuitive, self-service analytics to business users. It empowers end-users to explore the data, make meaningful business decisions, view real-time information, and share business intelligence with cross-functional teams. Easily see trends, patterns and relationships in data with unprecedented speed....

2009/02/09

2009/02/06

You may not realize it, but the data analytics market is buzzing. There are new vendors emerging, new products popping up, new deals being done, and several new strategies being pursued. Vendors are predominately chasing big data, with battles lines being drawn by solution providers that cater to between roughly 100 TB and 10 PB data sets. The battle was inevitable because the world is producing data at a phenomenal rate, and we have an increasing need to analyze them within shorter time frames. In this post we analyze one of these vendors, Kickfire....

2008/12/23

The phrase loudness war (or loudness race) refers to the music industry's tendency to record, produce and broadcast music at progressively increasing levels of loudness each year to create a sound that stands out from others and the previous year.

2008/12/07

Charts and graphics are integral parts of modern business reporting. The reason is easy to understand: charts give a richer view of a specific business activity, often highlighting important trends. The strength of visualizing data instead of plowing one’s way through immense tables or spreadsheets has also been adopted by analysts looking for greater insight into relationships between data. Visual displays are about both understanding data and communicating these findings....

2008/10/22

Managing data centers in silos used to make sense. Things change. Distributed, scale-out computing, complex web-based applications and virtualization defy the old ways. Splunk breaks through the silos, indexing data from every component. Search, alert and report on all your IT data from every application, server and device -- all in one place. Finding and fixing problems, following the trail of an attacker or tracing transactions is a whole lot faster and really easy....

2008/10/22

R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is a GNU project which is similar to the S language and environment which was developed at Bell Laboratories (formerly AT&T, now Lucent Technologies) by John Chambers and colleagues. R can be considered as a different implementation of S. There are some important differences, but much code written for S runs unaltered under R. R provides a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modelling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering, ...) and graphical techniques, and is highly extensible. The S language is often the vehicle of choice for research in statistical methodology, and R provides an Open Source route to participation in that activity....

2008/10/16

Visualization is a technique to graphically represent sets of data. When data is large or abstract, visualization can help make the data easier to read or understand. There are visualization tools for search, music, networks, online communities, and almost anything else you can think of. Whether you want a desktop application or a web-based tool, there are many specific tools are available on the web that let you visualize all kinds of data. Here are some of the best....

2008/10/16

Data presentation can be beautiful, elegant and descriptive. There is a variety of conventional ways to visualize data - tables, histograms, pie charts and bar graphs are being used every day, in every project and on every possible occasion. However, to convey a message to your readers effectively, sometimes you need more than just a simple pie chart of your results. In fact, there are much better, profound, creative and absolutely fascinating ways to visualize data. Many of them might become ubiquitous in the next few years....

2008/10/16

Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to "democratize" visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis. Jump right to our visualizations now, take a tour, or read on for a leisurely explanation of the project....