Over the years, many of you have been developing new RapidMiner Extensions dedicated to a broad set of topics. Whereas these extensions are easy to install in RapidMiner - just download and place them in the plugins folder - the hard part is to find them in the vastness that is the Internet. Extensions made by ourselves at Rapid-I, on the other hand,  are distributed by the update server making them searchable and installable directly inside RapidMiner.

We thought that this was a bit unfair, so we decieded to open up the update server to the public, and not only this, we even gave it a new look and name. The Rapid-I Marketplace is available in beta mode at http://rapidupdate.de:8180/ . You can use the Web interface to browse, comment, and rate the extensions, and you can use the update functionality in RapidMiner by going to the preferences and entering http://rapidupdate.de:8180/UpdateServer/ as the update server URL. (Once the beta test is complete, we will change the port back to 80 so we won't have any firewall problems.)

As an Extension developer, just register with the Marketplace and drop me an email (fischer at rapid-i dot com) so I can give you permissions to upload your own extension. Upload is simple provided you use the standard RapidMiner Extension build process and will boost visibility of your extension.

Looking forward to see many new extensions there soon!

We have already blogged on the RapidMiner Community Extension here and here . The community extension enables you to share your RapidMiner workflows with a large comunity of data miners all over the world on the community platform myExperiment.org.

 This can be a great benefit: You can learn about (and from) other people's work, make your own work more visible, get new ideas, and make friends with other data miners. I just made a small video showing how it works. Here it is:

During the RCOMM 2010 , Milan Vukiecevic gave a talk about WhiBo, which is like having a mini-RapidMiner within RapidMiner. They divided well known algorithms like decision trees into their components which can now be almost arbitrarily combined. This allows for the easy development of already known algorithms (like the many different decision tree or k-means variants) but also simplifies the detection of new ones.

Now the authors have translated the WhiBo extension to RapidMiner 5 and published  a first video about how to use the extension:

You can find more information about the WhiBo extension and how you can install it at

http://whibo.fon.bg.ac.rs/joomla/

If you are interested in the paper and other great papers about using RapidMiner and about new extensions, I would like to recommend the conference proceedings of the RCOMM 2010 to you.

We just have published a new extension called PaREn which can now be downloaded via our update server. The PaREn Automatic System Construction Wizard is a tool for supporting you in constructing a classification process within RapidMiner. For a given data set, it automatically recommends and constructs a classification process based on certain characteristics of the data set.

I did not believe that this actually works at first - but then I have seen the extension in action and it was amazing. You select a data set and the PaREn extension analyzes the data and predicts the expected accuracy  for a set of widely used data mining algorithms. Althoug the prediction is not 100% correct - the ranking most often is and that's the important part. An additional single click directly created the modeling process where even the parameters are already optimized.

This is actually the first third party extension we offer through our update server. And we love it! It was written by a team of great people of the DFKI (Deutsches Forschungszentrum für künstliche Intelligenz; German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence) . Thanks guys for a great addition to RapidMiner!

Thomas Ott of Neural Market Trends has made a nice video explaining the extension (an explaining web page can be found on the DFKI web site ):

I am looking forward to other great extensions which will be certainly published during the next weeks and months. A lot of promision work has already  be presented at the RCOMM 2010!

At the RCOMM, we had a challenge in which data miners had to design RapidMiner processes solving unusual tasks. The three tasks were to design a process that creates the lyrics of "99 bottles of beer", apply a model on a data set of which a complete column was lost, and to create a process that computes the Fibonacci numbers. All winning solutions, challenge descriptions, and necessary data preparation processes are now on myExperiment:

http://www.myexperiment.org/search?query=rcomm&type=all

I think they are worth looking at since they apply quite some clever tricks.

Furthermore, we have seen a lot of interesting and brand-new RapidMiner Extensions at the conference. One of them, made by the DFKI, assists the data miner in choosing an appropriate learner for their data set and saves you from trying a lot of different learners manually. The extensions is available from our update server and is described here:

 http://madm.dfki.de/rapidminer/wizard

Try it out!

We have released a new Community Extension for RapidMiner a few weeks ago which you can use to share your RapidMiner and RapidAnalytics processes with data miners all over the word.

Some of you may know the http://www.myexperiment.org/ portal. MyExperiment is a community website where people share workflows of various kinds. It is an active community, and the portal comes with all the nice social network features. The new Community Extension directly connects to myExperiment which means that you can easily upload the current process with a single click. The extension also allows to browse RapidMiner processes on myExperiment and download them to your local machine directly from within RapidMiner.

You should really consider to share interesting data analysis and data transformation processes with others. Why? Well, the obvious answer is that you can discuss your data mining processes with others, exchange workflows with them, and meet data miners working on similar problems which might give you some fresh ideas.

But there is a much more important reason: If you participate in myExperiment and share your RapidMiner processes with the new Community Extension, we all will be finally build a "data analysis process Wiki". I imagine this as a place, where processes for different kinds of problems just wait to be discovered. And just as for the original idea of Wikipedia, the whole thing will only work if people start to share their knowledge with others while hoping that somebody else's knowledge will help them back some day.

More information about how to use the Community Extension can be found at http://www.e-lico.eu/?q=node/226

So you should download the extension from our update- and installation server in the Help menu of RapidMiner, activate the myExperiment view in the View menu and start to up- and download processes. Happy sharing!