On Tuesday, May 29th, 2007, Rapid-I will release the next version of the open-source data mining software YALE, YALE 4.0beta, and change its name to RapidMiner 4.0beta.

Because of legal issues, Rapid-I decided to change the name of YALE. The name RapidMiner was chosen for its fit to the company name Rapid-I and to the naming scheme of the line of products planned by Rapid-I for the future. Only the name changes. Everything else stays the same. RapidMiner / YALE will remain open-source software under GNU GPL and available to end-users free of charge.

About RapidMiner / YALE

RapidMiner / YALE is a rapid prototyping system for knowledge discovery and data mining. While Rapid-I ensures the maintenance and further development of RapidMiner and the support of its users, RapidMiner will remain open-source (GPL). So, for end users of RapidMiner, nothing changes: using RapidMiner is free of charge. For developers of closed-source software who would like to integrate RapidMiner into their products, there now is the option of acquiring a developer license (OEM) for RapidMiner and using it as a powerful library to enhance their products with learnability, adaptability, and innovative analytical features. In addition to this dual licensing, Rapid-I continues the maintenance and further development of RapidMiner as well as the support of its rapidly growing user base. For and beyond RapidMiner, Rapid-I also offers services like consulting, professional support, customization, and integration.

RapidMiner / YALE is the technologically leading and with more than 400 data mining operators most comprehensive open-source data mining software world-wide. It is widely used from a large number of organizations covering a wide range of different branches. Today, thousands of applications of RapidMiner / YALE in more than 30 countries give their users a competitive edge.

Changes from YALE 3.4 to RapidMiner 4.0beta

Preview

General Improvements:

• Improved overall speed: Most YALE runs now use less than 60% of the runtime needed before.
• Large API changes now better support the embedding of YALE into your own applications.
• All YALE file formats are now based on XML.
• Improved printing.
• Several bugfixes.

New Operators:

• More than 80 new operators in total, including:
  • Several operators for outlier detection
  • FPGrowth (fast and memory efficient association rule mining)
  • A huge amount of new learning and meta learning schemes
  • CostBasedThresholdLearner (also allowing to classify examples as unknown)
  • (Weighted) Bootstrapping and BootstrappingValidation
  • Learning missing values (instead of simply replacing them)
  • Many new preprocessing operators like Merge, Cartesian Products, group by, aggregation, sorting, etc.
  • Writing data sets into databases now possible
  • Generic attribute subset preprocessing
  • Generic visualization of models via dimensionality reduction
  • New ANOVA matrix
• The clustering plugin is now part of the YALE core and hence does no longer need to be installed separately.

New Look and Feel:

• Drag & Drop for operator trees
• Completely revised look and feel as well as icons
• New file chooser providing favorites
• All tables (viewers) can be sorted by all columns by clicking on the corresponding table headers
• All textual results now support text selection allowing for copy and paste into other applications
• Log scale added as new option to usual scatter plotter
• Several chart plots added (new bars 2D and 3D, pie charts 2D and 3D, bubble plotter)
• Graphical User Interface (GUI) is now able to immediately stop a running experiment
• Graph view for Bayesian net models added
• Textual and graphical view modes added for models which are capable of both, e.g. decision trees and Bayesian nets
• Result history viewer showing textual descriptions of all experiment results in the session so far; allows also the calculations of Anova for different results

New Functions:

• Improved example filter (now also supporting inversion and concatenations)
• New additional performance criteria: Spearman's rho and Kendall's tau
• New data representation types based on short or even boolean further reducing the amount of memory needed
• New HSQLDB JDBC database drivers
• ExampleSetWriter now also supports zipped data files
• Source definition added for all IO objects, i.e. the results can now show, which operator was their creator, if necessary
• Improved automatic value type guessing in ExampleSource configuration wizard
• Weighted performance measures added for weighted means of the per-class recalls and precisions
• Model writing and loading now also works for zipped files (.gz)
• Improved attribute statistics handling and display
• Updatable models now supported
• XRFF format now supported

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