Rapidminer vs. Salford Predictive Miner

[fikio]

HI all, I am looking for software that is free or inexpensive for data mining and wanted to see if Rapidminer has the techniques that I am looking for. I have been using Salford Predictive Miner but am not going to be able to continue using it due to its cost, and wanted to find out how Rapidminer compares. I could not find much on the Internet in terms of the features. The techniques I have been using are:

recursive partitioning
multivariate adaptive spline models
multiple additive regression trees
random forests
boosting
etc.

Also, how much of a learning curve is there for Rapidminer? I know SAS and Python.

Thanks.

[awchisholm]

Hello

You could always use R with RapidMiner. I'm not an R expert but I found a package called "rpart" for recursive partitioning and "earth" for multivariate adaptive regression spline models (mars - ha ha). Random forests and boosting are already operators in RapidMiner.

Learning curve can be extensive but if you know another tool, I guess you would have the jargon learned already which in my experience is a great help. My personal experience is that it took a few months to really cross the line and become productive. There are many sources of data out there that help. I even maintain a low frequency blog http://rapidminernotes.blogspot.com/ to give something back to the community where I share the occasional thought about some tips and tricks I've learned on the way.

regards

Andrew

[fikio]

Thanks for the response. So MARS (very cute with the earth) is not available in RapidMiner? Can it do clustering, frequent itemset mining, and association rules?

If these modules are available in R what is the point of using RapidMiner integrated with R? Wouldn't I just use R by itself?

Is there any way to integrate RapidMiner with Python? It would be ideal since I am learning Python and it doesn't make sense for me to learn R as well.

Thanks!

[radone]

Hi fikio,
Yes, rapidminer supports clustering, frequent itemset mining, and also association rules. Actually, you do not need R extension for that.
I am afraid that there is not any simple way how to use Python, however you can use Groovy, which is C or JAVA like scripting language.

radone