Revolution Analytics

Analysis of Revolution Analytics and its efforts related to the R analytical language. Related subjects include:

October 10, 2014

Notes on predictive modeling, October 10, 2014

As planned, I’m getting more active in predictive modeling. Anyhow …

1. I still believe most of what I said in a July, 2013 predictive modeling catch-all post. However, I haven’t heard as much subsequently about Ayasdi as I had expected to.

2. The most controversial part of that post was probably the claim:

I think the predictive modeling state of the art has become:

  • Cluster in some way.
  • Model separately on each cluster.

In particular:

3. Nutonian is now a client. I just had my first meeting with them this week. To a first approximation, they’re somewhat like KXEN (sophisticated math, non-linear models, ease of modeling, quasi-automagic feature selection), but with differences that start: Read more

November 19, 2013

How Revolution Analytics parallelizes R

I talked tonight with Lee Edlefsen, Chief Scientist of Revolution Analytics, and now think I understand Revolution’s parallel R much better than I did before.

There are four primary ways that people try to parallelize predictive modeling:

One confusing aspect of this discussion is that it could reference several heavily-overlapping but not identical categories of algorithms, including:

  1. External memory algorithms, which operates on datasets too big to fit in main memory, by — for starters — reading in and working on a part of the data at a time. Lee observes that these are almost always parallelizable.
  2. What Revolution markets as External Memory Algorithms, which are those external memory algorithms it has gotten around to implementing so far. These are all parallelized. They are also all in the category of …
  3. … algorithms that can be parallelized by:
    • Operating on data in parts.
    • Getting intermediate results.
    • Combining them in some way for a final result.
  4. Algorithms of the previous category, where the way of combining them specifically is in the form of summation, such as those discussed in the famous paper Map-Reduce for Machine Learning on Multicore. Not all of Revolution’s current parallel algorithms fall into this group.

To be clear, all Revolution’s parallel algorithms are in Category #2 by definition and Category #3 in practice. However, they aren’t all in Category #4.

Read more

September 20, 2013

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:

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.

Read more

August 25, 2013

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.

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

May 28, 2012

Quick-turnaround predictive modeling

Last November, I wrote two posts on agile predictive analytics. It’s time to return to the subject. I’m used to KXEN talking about the ability to do predictive modeling, very quickly, perhaps without professional statisticians; that the core of what KXEN does. But I was surprised when Revolution Analytics told me a similar story, based on a different approach, because ordinarily that’s not how R is used at all.

Ultimately, there seem to be three reasons why you’d want quick turnaround on your predictive modeling: Read more

April 8, 2011

Revolution Analytics update

I wasn’t too impressed when I spoke with Revolution Analytics at the time of its relaunch last year. But a conversation Thursday evening was much clearer. And I even learned some cool stuff about general predictive modeling trends (see the bottom of this post).

Revolution Analytics business and business model highlights include:

Read more

May 4, 2010

Revolution Analytics seems very confused

Revolution Analytics is a relaunch of a company previously known as REvolution Computing, built around the open source R language. Last week they sent around email claiming they were a new company (false), and asking for briefings in connection with an embargo this morning. I talked to Revolution Analytics yesterday, and they told me the embargo had been moved to Thursday.* However, Revolution apparently neglected to tell the press the same thing, and there’s an article out today — quoting me, because I’d given quotes in line with the original embargo, before I’d had the briefing myself. And what’s all this botched timing about? Mainly, it seems to be for a “statement of direction” about software Revolution Analytics hasn’t actually developed yet.

*More precisely, they spoke as if the embargo had been Thursday all along.

Read more

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