As a company, Rapid-I of course is interested in getting paid for our software and services. This should actually be loan enough but actually we often get much more for which we are also grateful: the look on people's faces seeing for a first time how well data mining works and what they probably can get out of it. This is amazing.

Being not only a company but even an open source company allows us to share this great feeling even more often. In his blog entry, Joshua Frankamp shares his experiences with us. Quote:

"This puts a huge grin on my face."

Why's this? Well, have a look  at the following picture:

 

Regular RapidMiner users can imediately tell that this is probably the plot of a hierarchical cluster model.

"It tells me that BAC, KEY, MI, RF, SNV, and STI are related. They’re all acronyms, yes, but more than that. They are all banking stock symbols. The node that the arrow points to contains these values. All banks. The nodes on either side contain exclusively real estate holding companies and home builders respectively."

Well, this might of course not be surprising from a data analysts point of view, but as far as I can see, Joshua has just started his data mining tour. And I got the feeling that now he got hooked and will probably never stop :-)

Ok folks, have fun discovering those and other - maybe more hidden - insights  with RapidMiner. And don't forget the look you had on your face the first time you have seen some correlation or causal connections - data analysis can be and should be surprising every day anew. Last quote from Joshua:

"Its great to be able to test out some of the things that I’ve been learning about in an environment that lets me try a lot of things in a relatively short amount of time. "

Two thumbs up, Joshua and keep going!

 

A couple of weeks ago, the author Neural Concepts has posted a description of a a very interesting application for RapidMiner and its new R Extension. In his blog A Physicist in Wall Street , he has described a complete trading system based on this combination.

Our blog post about this financial data mining application quickly became one of our most often read articles here in this blog and so I am sure that many of you will be really happy to see that Neural Concepts has improved his processes by means of genetic optimization schemes and get much better results now. The following picture shows the return over time:

 

 

The goal still is the prediction of the next day's close price in order to generate buying and selling signals. But now the approach was improved a lot and described in detail in a nice video. Check out the original blog post for more details:

http://aphysicistinwallstreet.blogspot.com/2010/12/genetic-optimization-for-trading-using.html

 

And here is the video showing all steps in detail:

 

Hi,

one of our forum members has posted a link to a very interesting application for RapidMiner and its new R Extension. In the blog A Physicist in Wall Street , the author Neural Concepts describes a complete trading system based on this combination.

In order to check the power of RapidMiner + R, the author made a simple example using an algorithm based on a support vector machine for predicting the next day's price and based on it I generated buying and selling signals. Check out the original blog post for more details:

http://aphysicistinwallstreet.blogspot.com/2010/11/example-rapidminer-r-for-trading.html

 

 

The requirements needed to build the model are, of course, RapidMiner, the Weka Extension, the Time Series Extension and the R Extension. This requires installing R with quantmod, TTR and PerformanceAnalytics packages.

The greatest thing about his post is the fact that every single step is described in high detail. It seems that the results can be easily reproduced - which, I have to admit, I dit not try myself yet. Another nice option: you can donate a small quantity and this would allow you to download the processes etc. directly.