The market for data visualization software has bloomed. I'm suspicious.

Companies like Tableau, Spotfire, SAS Visual Analytics, Qlik and Zoomdata are positioning their tools far beyond traditional business intelligence.  Capabilities for graphically navigating data, recognizing patterns and finding relationships are growing in both functional and economic scope.  These new tools can provide charting forms only imagined in the last decade like word clouds, circular hierarchies, tree…

The full version is always published Monday. Starred articles or sections are new additions or updated content, posted between Thursday and Sunday. 

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• Bottom line on Data Visualization *…

The United Nations and World Bank are part of a growing globally-oriented Open Data movement.  After World Bank meetings last week in Washington, DC, those involved in defining the international Big Data Revolution asked for inputs.  This is what I posted:

There is no doubt that big data offers significant and exponential potential for international development work across multiple fields.  That this Independent Advisory Group has been formed is clear evidence that the United…

Data science is the result of a new paradigm taking place in IT. The question was raised recently, and here I explain how and why data science is part of this new paradigm, and not recycled material.

New arsenal of techniques and metrics

Many data science techniques are very different, if not the opposite of old techniques that were…

While there is much hype and confusion around "data science" and the hot new professional "data scientist…

What is pervasive analytics?

During eras of global economic shifts, there was always a key resource discovered that became the spark of transformation for groups of individuals that could effectively harness it. Today, that resource is data. In no uncertain terms, we are witnessing a global data rush and leading companies realize that data will grow enterprise over the next several decades as much as any capital asset. These forward-looking…

As organizations look for strategic direction on the Internet of Things (IoT), it’s their developers who are likely to be the strongest advocates for sifting out which technologies and standards can provide the best competitive edge.

Andy Stanford-Clark (@andysc) is the Chief Technologist for Smarter Energy in IBM’s consulting business in energy and utilities for IBM U.K.  He’s also an IBM distinguished engineer and a master…

We have produced a 90-second video (click on this link to view the video) showing a 'random walk' (a particular case of a Markov process) evolving over 400,000 steps. Figure 1 below shows the last frame (out of 2,000 frames, each one with 200 new steps).…

The celebrity of Toronto's mayor has certainly drawn a lot of attention to the city in recent years. Several candidates are now running for Rob Ford's job. Since the mayor is currently undergoing treatment for cancer, he decided to withhold his candidacy in the upcoming municipal election. Being a longtime resident of Toronto, and being aware of the city's wealth and poverty, I'm always interested in how these competing needs play out when it is time to vote.  Consider the interesting…

Post the financial crisis, banks in the US have faced increased regulatory scrutiny that has resulted in broader and tougher regulations. Bankers are fully aware of the investments and efforts they have to put in to comply with these regulations. Consequently, compliance function in banks is evolving towards a broader risk canvas that is now seeking tighter coordination between the first and second lines of defense. This poses new challenges to banks – from being compliant to getting the…

We want to create a repository of apps / APIs that provide forecasts and predictions for a broad class of questions that concern all  human beings. We would also like to create our own predictive API - so if you are interested in this project, contact us at [email protected], we might have a gig for you! Here's an example of what we did in the past. We also designed apps for stock market predictions (see…

Hadoop: The Elephant In The Room

Hadoop has been a great solution to analyzing big data, but is too much for most companies. Most don’t have petabytes of data, or a team of engineers and PhD’s to set up and maintain a cluster. So what options are left for these companies? Until recently..not many. There are a few startups looking to change this.

Zillabyte

A distributed cloud platform built independent of Hadoop,…

The full version is always published Monday. Starred articles or sections are new additions or updated content, posted between Thursday and Sunday. 

Featured

• Data scientists face burnout due to work-related stress *…

This article was first posted in 2014 but the message bears repeating.  There is a lot being written about tools simple enough for the citizen data scientist to operate.  The unstated constraint is that if you don't have significant experience in data science then these will always be "good enough" models.  The problem is that 'good enough' models under achieve both revenue and profit.  Very small increases in model fitness can translate into much larger increases in campaign ROI.  Business…

How are developers building the next big app? What’s this next big app look like? What are the factors that will transform Big Data-infused apps into game-changers?

Actuate recently invited four industry experts to discuss the future of creating the next generation of data-driven applications and how they are influenced by open source and freemium software.



Allen…

How are developers building the next big app? What’s this next big app look like? What are the factors that will transform Big Data-infused apps into game-changers?

Actuate recently invited four industry experts to discuss the future of creating the next generation of data-driven applications and how they are influenced by open source and freemium software.…

How are developers building the next big app? What’s this next big app look like? What are the factors that will transform Big Data-infused apps into game-changers?

These are important questions to answer in a time when the lines are blurring between consumer and enterprise applications; business-to-business and business-to-consumer communications; and open-source and freemium and commercial software.

Actuate recently invited four industry experts to discuss…

Has the availability of more data improved democracy around the world? Watch the talk in which Conrad Wolfram discusses how computation for everyone can help people get answers relevant for them and how allowing people to make informed decisions in the key to our future democracy.

If you're in the UK and would like to hear more from Conrad, he's delivering a talk 'Master Your Data with Computation' in London on 21 November. Details at …

Top data science bloggers, authors, websites, or Twitter profiles worth following is now a popular topic, sure to attract lots of attention. We've published our share, including 

• Top 2,500 Data Science, Big Data and Analytics Websites…

As a product manager in the domain of predictive analytics, I own the responsibility to build predictive analytics capabilities for consumer facing and/or enterprise platforms; the business applications vary among item recommendations for consumers, prediction of event outcomes based on classification models, demand forecasting for supply optimization, and so on. We usually see the applications where the predictive model built using machine learning technique(s) is leveraged to score the new…