As of RapidMiner 5.1.11, we have introduced a new kind of I/O-Object in RapidMiner: File Objects. File Objects are generated by opening local files, URLs, looping over directories or ZIP files, etc. They are then parsed by Read CSV or Read Excel and converted to an example set. All this was possible before, partly by using macros, but it is now much simpler and more flexible.

Foremost, however, it offers a new way of sending input data to a process exposed as a Web service in RapidAnalytics: The body of the HTTP POST request is transformed into such a File Object and can then be parsed as a part of the process. This makes the definition of the input format of a Web service very flexible and provides a simple means to create Web services that classify data tables.

Watch this video for more details:

Throughout our RapidAnalytics video series we have designed a report with various components, but we have always left the settings that determine the look of the report at their default values. In fact, there are very many of these settings, and it would be tedious to define them for every report and every component individually.

In this post I will show how you can use style bundles to define the look of your reports once and apply it to your reports with a single click.

In the last video we have created views. We will now use report "actions" to create virtual views: Each virtual view will use the same set of components, but different assignment of variables.

Up to now, the report we created in the RapidAnalytics video tutorial consisted of a single view: A collection of report components like charts, tables, etc. You can think of views as "pages" of your report or as "sub-reports". Now we are going to add more views between which the user can navigate by clicking on the navigation bar or by interacting with charts and tables.

If you follow our RapidAnalytics video series, you already know how to make simple reports with charts based on RapidMiner processes. This time, we spice that up a bit by defining interactions between report components to realize drill-downs etc.

In last week's post I have described how to create Web based dynamic charts out of RapidMiner processes. We now compose complex reports out of these charts. You will also learn how to define domains that make selecting parameters more comfortable for the report viewer, and help to ensure that only legal parameters are entered.

Next week we will see how interactions like drill-downs etc. can be defined.

In today's video tutorial I discuss one of my favourite features of RapidAnalytics. I'll explain how you can turn a RapidMiner process into a Web service. RapidMiner macros will be the parameters of the Web service, and output can be formatted in various ways. It can be either a presentation-oriented service (Flash charts, images, tables, etc.) or it can generate machine readable output in various formats. Thus, you can easily integrate RapidAnalytics with other IT infrastructure.

In a later post I will show how this can be used to create complex interactive reports.

 In the first video post about the basics of RapidAnalytics I had shown how RapidMiner processes can be executed on RapidAnalytics. This time, I'm going a bit more into the details and show some advanced scheduling features.

In this video you will learn how to

• schedule processes for delayed execution,
• schedule processes for regular execution,
• use RapidMiner or the Web interface to do this,
• monitor process execution on the Web and in RapidMiner, and
  
• parametrizing the the executed process when submitting the schedule.

Today we'll start a new video series demonstrating how to use RapidAnalytics for your analytic work. RapidAnalytics is the new data mining server solution that uses RapidMiner both as a data mining engine and as a fron-end to design data mining processes.

In this first video you will learn how to

• use the Web interface,
  
• connect RapidMiner to  RapidAnalytics,
• store data on RapidAnalytics,
• execute processes on RapidAnalytics, and
• open the results in RapidMiner.

To reproduce what is shown in the video, you need to install RapidMiner 5.1 and RapidAnalytics 1.0, both of which is available from our Web site.

This is only the beginning of the new series. In subsequent posts you will learn how to schedule processes regularly, expose processes as Web services to embed them into other applications, how to generate fancy Web-based dynamic reports based on RapidMiner processes, and more.