Predictive modeling and advanced analytics
Discussion of technologies and vendors in the overlapping areas of predictive analytics, predictive modeling, data mining, machine learning, Monte Carlo analysis, and other “advanced” analytics.
Libraries in Teradata Aster
I recently wrote (emphasis added):
My clients at Teradata Aster probably see things differently, but I don’t think their library of pre-built analytic packages has been a big success. The same goes for other analytic platform vendors who have done similar (generally lesser) things. I believe that this is because such limited libraries don’t do enough of what users want.
The bolded part has been, shall we say, confirmed. As Randy Lea tells it, Teradata Aster sales qualification includes the determination that at least one SQL-MR operator — be relevant to the use case. (“Operator” seems to be the word now, rather than “function”.) Randy agreed that some users prefer hand-coding, but believes a large majority would like to push work to data analysts/business analysts who might have strong SQL skills, but be less adept at general mathematical programming.
This phrasing will all be less accurate after the release of Aster 6, which extends Aster’s capabilities beyond the trinity of SQL, the SQL-MR library, and Aster-supported hand-coding.
Randy also said:
- A typical Teradata Aster production customer uses 8-12 of the prebuilt functions (but now they seem to be called operators).
- nPath is used in almost every Aster account. (And by now nPath has morphed into a family of about 5 different things.)
- The Aster collaborative filtering operator is used in almost every account.
- Ditto a/the text operator.
- Several business intelligence vendors are partnering for direct access to selected Teradata Aster operators — mentioned were Tableau, TIBCO Spotfire, and Alteryx.
- I don’t know whether this is on the strength of a specific operator or not, but Aster is used to help with predictive parts failure applications in multiple industries.
And Randy seemed to agree when I put words in his mouth to the effect that the prebuilt operators save users months of development time.
Meanwhile, Teradata Aster has started a whole new library for relationship analytics.
| Categories: Application areas, Aster Data, Data warehousing, Predictive modeling and advanced analytics, Teradata, Text | 1 Comment |
What matters in investigative analytics?
In a general pontification on positioning, I wrote:
every product in a category is positioned along the same set of attributes,
and went on to suggest that summary attributes were more important than picky detailed ones. So how does that play out for investigative analytics?
First, summary attributes that matter for almost any kind of enterprise software include:
- Performance and scalability. I write about analytic performance and scalability a lot. Usually that’s in the context of analytic DBMS, but it also arises in analytic stacks such as Platfora, Metamarkets or even QlikView, and also in the challenges of making predictive modeling scale.
- Reliability, availability and security.* This is more crucial for short-request applications than analytic ones, but even your analytic systems shouldn’t leak data or crash.
- Goodness of fit with legacy systems. I hate that one, because enterprises often sacrifice way too much in favor of that benefit.
- Price. Duh.
*I picked up that phrase when — abbreviated as RAS — it was used to characterize the emphasis for Oracle 8. I like it better than a general and ambiguous concept of “enterprise-ready”.
The reason I’m writing this post, however, is to call out two summary attributes of special importance in investigative analytics — which regrettably which often conflict with each other — namely:
- Agility. People don’t want to submit requests for reports or statistical analyses; they want to get answers as soon as the questions come to mind.
- Completeness of feature set — for a particular use case, that is. There’s no such thing as an investigative analytics offering with a feature set that’s close to complete for all purposes; even SAS, IBM and other behemoths fall short.
Much of what I work on boils down to those two subjects. For example: Read more
| Categories: Aster Data, Business intelligence, Data warehousing, KXEN, Predictive modeling and advanced analytics, SAS Institute, Teradata | 11 Comments |
Trends in predictive modeling
I talked with Teradata about a bunch of stuff yesterday, including this week’s announcements in in-database predictive modeling. The specific news was about partnerships with Fuzzy Logix and Revolution Analytics. But what I found more interesting was the surrounding discussion. In a nutshell:
- Teradata is finally seeing substantial interest in in-database modeling, rather than just in-database scoring (which has been important for years) and in-database data preparation (which is a lot like ELT — Extract/Load/transform).
- Teradata is seeing substantial interest in R.
- It seems as if similar groups of customers are interested in both parts of that, such as:
- Usual-suspect consumer marketing sectors (telecom, credit card, retail).*
- Semiconductor manufacturing.**
- Parallelized SAS modeling on Teradata seems to be limited by the small number of algorithms that are parallelized. (SAS scoring, I presume, is a different matter.)
This is the strongest statement of perceived demand for in-database modeling I’ve heard. (Compare Point #3 of my July predictive modeling post.) And fits with what I’ve been hearing about R.
| Categories: EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Parallelization, Predictive modeling and advanced analytics, Revolution Analytics, SAS Institute, Telecommunications, Teradata | 1 Comment |
SAP is buying KXEN
First, some quick history.
- I first heard of KXEN 7-8 years ago from Roman Bukary, then of SAP. He positioned KXEN as an easy-to-embed predictive modeling tool, which was getting various interesting partnerships and OEM deals.
- Returning those near-roots, KXEN is being bought (Q4 expected close) by SAP.
- I say “near roots” because KXEN’s original story had something to do with SVMs (Support Vector Machines).
- But that was already old news back in 2006, and KXEN had pivoted to a simpler and more automated modeling approach. Presumably, this ease of modeling was part of the reason for KXEN’s OEM/partnership appeal.
However, I don’t want to give the impression that KXEN is the second coming of Crystal Reports. Most of what I heard about KXEN’s partnership chops, after Roman’s original heads-up, came from Teradata. Even KXEN itself didn’t seem to see that as a major part of their strategy.
And by the way, KXEN is yet another example of my observation that fancy math rarely drives great enterprise software success.
KXEN’s most recent strategies are perhaps best described by contrasting it to the vastly larger SAS. Read more
| Categories: KXEN, Predictive modeling and advanced analytics, SAP AG, SAS Institute | 5 Comments |
Cloudera Hadoop strategy and usage notes
When we scheduled a call to talk about Sentry, Cloudera’s Charles Zedlewski and I found time to discuss other stuff as well. One interesting part of our discussion was around the processing “frameworks” Cloudera sees as most important.
- The four biggies are:
- MapReduce. Duh.
- SQL, specifically Impala. This is as opposed to the uneasy Hive/MapReduce layering.
- Search.
- “Math” , which seems to mainly be through partnerships with SAS and Revolution Analytics. I don’t know a lot about how these work, but I presume they bypass MapReduce, in which case I could imagine them greatly outperforming Mahout.
- Stream processing (Storm) is next in line.
- Graph — e.g. Giraph — rises to at least the proof-of-concept level. Again, the hope would be that this well outperforms graph-on-MapReduce.
- Charles is also seeing at least POC interest in Spark.
- But MPI (Message Passing Interface) on Hadoop isn’t going anywhere fast, except to the extent it’s baked into SAS or other “math” frameworks. Generic MPI use cases evidently turn out to be a bad fit for Hadoop, due to factors such as:
- Low data volumes.
- Latencies in various parts of the system
HBase was artificially omitted from this “frameworks” discussion because Cloudera sees it as a little bit more of a “storage” system than a processing one.
Another good subject was offloading work to Hadoop, in a couple different senses of “offload”: Read more
Why privacy laws should be based on data use, not data possession
For years I’ve argued three points about privacy intrusions and surveillance:
- Privacy intrusions are a huge threat to liberty. Since the Snowden revelations started last June, this view has become more widely accepted.
- Much of the problem is the very chilling effects they can have upon the exercise of day-to-day freedoms. Fortunately, I’m not as alone in saying that as I once feared. For example, Christopher Slobogin made that point in a recent CNN article, and then pointed me to a paper* citing other people echoing it, including Sonia Sotomayor.
- Liberty can’t be effectively protected just by controls on the collection, storage, or dissemination of data; direct controls are needed on the use of data as well. Use-based data controls are much more robust in the face of technological uncertainty and change than possession-based ones are.
Since that last point is still very much a minority viewpoint,** I’ll argue it one more time below. Read more
The two sides of BI
As is the case for most important categories of technology, discussions of BI can get confused. I’ve remarked in the past that there are numerous kinds of BI, and that the very origin of the term “business intelligence” can’t even be pinned down to the nearest century. But the most fundamental confusion of all is that business intelligence technology really is two different things, which in simplest terms may be categorized as user interface (UI) and platform* technology. And so:
- The UI aspect is why BI tends to be sold to business departments; the platform aspect is why it also makes sense to sell BI to IT shops attempting to establish enterprise standards.
- The UI aspect is why it makes sense to sell and market BI much as one would applications; the platform aspect is why it makes sense to sell and market BI much as one would database technology.
- The UI aspect is why vendors want to integrate BI with transaction-processing applications; the platform aspect is, I suppose, why they have so much trouble making the integration work.
- The UI aspect is why BI is judged on … well, on snazzy UIs and demos. The platform aspect is a big reason why the snazziest UI doesn’t always win.
*I wanted to say “server” or “server-side” instead of “platform”, as I dislike the latter word. But it’s too inaccurate, for example in the case of the original Cognos PowerPlay, and also in various thin-client scenarios.
Key aspects of BI platform technology can include:
- Query and data management. That’s the area I most commonly write about, for example in the cases of Platfora, QlikView, or Metamarkets. It goes back to the 1990s — notably the Business Objects semantic layer and Cognos PowerPlay MOLAP (MultiDimensional OnLine Analytic Processing) engine — and indeed before that to the report writers and fourth-generation languages of the 1970s. This overlaps somewhat with …
- … data integration and metadata management. Business Objects, Qlik, and other BI vendors have bought data integration vendors. Arguably, there was a period when Information Builders’ main business was data connectivity and integration. And sometimes the main value proposition for a BI deal is “We need some way to get at all that data and bring it together.”
- Security and access control — authentication, authorization, and all the additional As.
- Scheduling and delivery. When 10s of 1000s of desktops are being served, these aren’t entirely trivial. Ditto when dealing with occasionally-connected mobile devices.
“Disruption” in the software industry
I lampoon the word “disruptive” for being badly overused. On the other hand, I often refer to the concept myself. Perhaps I should clarify. 🙂
You probably know that the modern concept of disruption comes from Clayton Christensen, specifically in The Innovator’s Dilemma and its sequel, The Innovator’s Solution. The basic ideas are:
- Market leaders serve high-end customers with complex, high-end products and services, often distributed through a costly sales channel.
- Upstarts serve a different market segment, often cheaply and/or simply, perhaps with a different business model (e.g. a different sales channel).
- Upstarts expand their offerings, and eventually attack the leaders in their core markets.
In response (this is the Innovator’s Solution part):
- Leaders expand their product lines, increasing the value of their offerings in their core markets.
- In particular, leaders expand into adjacent market segments, capturing margins and value even if their historical core businesses are commoditized.
- Leaders may also diversify into direct competition with the upstarts, but that generally works only if it’s via a separate division, perhaps acquired, that has permission to compete hard with the main business.
But not all cleverness is “disruption”.
- Routine product advancement by leaders — even when it’s admirably clever — is “sustaining” innovation, as opposed to the disruptive stuff.
- Innovative new technology from small companies is not, in itself, disruption either.
Here are some of the examples that make me think of the whole subject. Read more
More notes on predictive modeling
My July 2 comments on predictive modeling were far from my best work. Let’s try again.
1. Predictive analytics has two very different aspects.
Developing models, aka “modeling”:
- Is a big part of investigative analytics.
- May or may not be difficult to parallelize and/or integrate into an analytic RDBMS.
- May or may not require use of your whole database.
- Generally is done by humans.
- Often is done by people with special skills, e.g. “statisticians” or “data scientists”.
More precisely, some modeling algorithms are straightforward to parallelize and/or integrate into RDBMS, but many are not.
Using models, most commonly:
- Is done by machines …
- … that “score” data according to the models.
- May be done in batch or at run-time.
- Is embarrassingly parallel, and is much more commonly integrated into analytic RDBMS than modeling is.
2. Some people think that all a modeler needs are a few basic algorithms. (That’s why, for example, analytic RDBMS vendors are proud of integrating a few specific modeling routines.) Other people think that’s ridiculous. Depending on use case, either group can be right.
3. If adoption of DBMS-integrated modeling is high, I haven’t noticed.
| Categories: Ayasdi, Data warehousing, Hadoop, Health care, IBM and DB2, KXEN, Predictive modeling and advanced analytics, SAS Institute | 6 Comments |
Notes and comments, July 2, 2013
I’m not having a productive week, part of the reason being a hard drive crash that took out early drafts of what were to be last weekend’s blog posts. Now I’m operating from a laptop, rather than my preferred dual-monitor set-up. So please pardon me if I’m concise even by comparison to my usual standards.
- My recent posts based on surveillance news have been partly superseded by – well, by more news. Some of that news, along with some good discussion, may be found in the comment threads.
- The same goes for my recent Hadoop posts.
- The replay for my recent webinar on real-time analytics is now available. My part ran <25 minutes.
- One of my numerous clients using or considering a “real-time analytics” positioning is Sqrrl, the company behind the NoSQL DBMS Accumulo. Last month, Derrick Harris reported on a remarkable Accumulo success story – multiple US intelligence instances managing 10s of petabytes each, and supporting a variety of analytic (I think mainly query/visualization) approaches.
- Several sources have told me that MemSQL’s Zynga sale is (in part) for Membase replacement. This is noteworthy because Zynga was the original pay-for-some-of-the-development Membase customer.
- More generally, the buzz out of Couchbase is distressing. Ex-employees berate the place; job-seekers check around and then decide not to go there; rivals tell me of resumes coming out in droves. Yes, there’s always some of that, even at obviously prospering companies, but this feels like more than the inevitable low-level buzz one hears anywhere.
- I think the predictive modeling state of the art has become:
- Cluster in some way.
- Model separately on each cluster.
- And if you still want to do something that looks like a regression – linear or otherwise – then you might want to use a tool that lets you shovel training data in WITHOUT a whole lot of preparation* and receive a model back out. Even if you don’t accept that as your final model, it can at least be a great guide to feature selection (in the statistical sense of the phrase) and the like.
- Champion/challenger model testing is also a good idea, at least if you’re in some kind of personalization/recommendation space, and have enough traffic to test like that.**
- Most companies have significant turnover after being acquired, perhaps after a “golden handcuff” period. Vertica is no longer an exception.
- Speaking of my clients at HP Vertica – they’ve done a questionable job of communicating that they’re willing to price their product quite reasonably. (But at least they allowed me to write about $2K/terabyte for hardware/software combined.)
- I’m hearing a little more Amazon Redshift buzz than I expected to. Just a little.
- StreamBase was bought by TIBCO. The rumor says $40 million.
*Basic and unavoidable ETL (Extract/Transform/Load) of course excepted.
**I could call that ABC (Always Be Comparing) or ABT (Always Be Testing), but they each sound like – well, like The Glove and the Lions.