Upcoming analytics courses, free webinars and articles
December 2013 newsletter

Thanks for your interest in our newsletter, please forward it to colleagues that may benefit from it. Please join us for our upcoming webinar next Monday on common analytic issues and mistakes in Tableau 8.

Eileen and I are excited to share our new courses on Tableau, Microstrategy Analytics Desktop (a free alternative for visual analytics and dashboards), SAS programming and data exploration and visualization are all available for on-site instruction.

We are booking engagements with clients for on-site training and strategic consulting projects throughout Q1 and into Q2 of 2014, please let us know if we can help you in 2014!

Data Management and Visual Analytics with Tableau (2 days)
January 28th-29th, 2014—Chicago, Illinois
Everyone can benefit from learning a reliable, flexible and repeatable method to analyze real-world data. Combine this with a solid grounding in the flow and core features of Tableau to achieve great returns with this course. In just two days, you will complete multiple real-world case studies with Tableau paired with supporting data management capabilities of Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access.

Data Management and Visual Analytics with Microstrategy Analytics Desktop (2 days)
Microstrategy Analytics Desktop is an exciting new offering of Microstrategy, an established leader in business intelligence. Available as a free product for both personal and professional use, Freakalytics considers this new product a good alternative to other leading products in visual analytics and analytic dashboards. It is capable of working with local data sources such as Excel, text files and Access databases in addition to remote, big data sources such as SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL and Hadoop.

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Eight common analytic issues and mistakes in Tableau 8

Understand them, avoid them and correct them December 23rd, 2013 — 11 AM Central, Noon Eastern, 9 AM Pacific, 5 PM London Click here to register Synopsis In this webinar, Stephen reviews common shortcomings and misunderstandings that can prevent effective use of Tableau. These issues can result in misleading or just plain wrong answers being … Read more

A spin-free explanation of data warehouse versus big data

It should be no surprise that many Hadoop (big data) systems sit side by side with data warehouses. These systems serve different purposes and complement one another.”
– Joint quote from CTO of cloudera and General Manager at Teradata

big-data-example-versus-data-warehouse

As you may have heard, big data is all the craze and at the top of the technology hype cycle! In my opinion, it is thoroughly confusing business execs, overwhelming IT teams and being used to market a massive range of new startups, sometimes justifiably. The reality is that big data will most likely NOT replace your data warehouse and the data scientist will most likely NOT replace your business analyst teams.

In a recent white paper,

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Top News – Data, Data Warehousing, Analytics & BI

November 18th, 2013
Stephen McDaniel
Chief Data Officer Advisor at Freakalytics, LLC

Finding it hard to make time to keep up with the rapidly changing world of data, data warehousing, analytics, data science, business intelligence and visual analytics? We understand! Here’s our curated summary of relevant news that could help with your future data and analytic projects. We also add commentary on the topic, a summary of the article and the link to read the full article.

There are four articles in this update:
     Amazon wades into big data streams with Kinesis
     Top 10 Trends in Text Analytics
     Effective Customer Analytics Call for Data Integration, Culture Shifts
     Your Car Is a Data Platform, What Can It Tell About You?

Missed our last issue of Top News, November 15th? Stories included RapidMiner (free and premium data mining), big data not top CFO priority, the DATA Act passes Senate, SAS replacing PowerPoint and big data sources to consider at your company.
 
 
 
 
 
1_1Amazon wades into big data streams with Kinesis

Amazon adds another layer to data storage and streaming options-Kinesis. Kinesis is all about real-time data collection and aggregation in a hosted cloud-scalable from Megabytes to Terabytes per hour! As such, it is a service that keeps your data for a maximum of 24 hours, by which time you presumably used it or stored it in a data warehouse (like Amazon Redshift), Hadoop system (like Amazon Elastic Map Reduce), NoSQL system (like Amazon Dynamo DB) or file store (like Amazon S3!) Do you notice a trend here?

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Top News – Data, Data Warehousing, Analytics & BI

November 15th, 2013
Stephen McDaniel
Chief Data Officer Advisor at Freakalytics, LLC

Finding it hard to make time to keep up with the rapidly changing world of data, data warehousing, analytics, data science, business intelligence and visual analytics?  We understand! Here’s our curated summary of relevant news that could help with your future data and analytic projects. We also add commentary on the topic, a summary of the article and the link to read the full article.

There are five articles in this update:
     Rapid-I data mining now RapidMiner, the Redhat of data mining?
     Integrating data and mobile trumps big data for many CFOs
     Bipartisan DATA Act unanimously approved by Senate Committee
     Can SAS Visual Analytics replace PowerPoint?
     Big data sources to consider for your company

Missed our last issue of Top News, November 11th? Stories included Big Data and Society, Data Mining Blues, 2014 INFORMS Conference, Facebook’s Free Big Data System for Analysts, Adaptive Data Preparation, How Trust Affects the Use of Analytics and Meeting a VAST Challenge
 
 
 
 
 
2Rapid-I data mining now RapidMiner,
the Redhat of data mining?

German predictive analytics, data mining and text mining company receives $5M in funding and announces a planned move of their headquarters to Boston from Dortmund, Germany. I would liken it to the Redhat of data mining, with a free community edition and paid corporate editions that adds support, more data sources and more capabilities. With over 3 million downloads, 20,000 deployments and 400 paid customers including eBay, Intel, PepsiCo and Kraft you may want to consider RapidMiner for your advanced analytics projects. The 2013 KDNuggets poll showed RapidMiner’s free edition ahead of every other advanced analytics choice including R.

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Top News – Data, Data Warehousing, Analytics & BI

November 11th, 2013
Stephen McDaniel
Chief Data Officer Advisor at Freakalytics, LLC

i5_2Finding it hard to make time to keep up with the rapidly changing world of data, data warehousing, analytics, data science, business intelligence and visual analytics?  We understand! Here’s our curated summary of relevant news that could help with your future data and analytic projects. We also add commentary on the topic, a summary of the article and the link to read the full article.

There are seven articles in this update:
     How Big Data Is Changing Science (and Society)
     Big data blues: The dangers of data mining
     2014 INFORMS Conference on the Business of Big Data
     Facebook System for Massive Big Data (Hadoop FS) Offered Free to World
     Paxata Launches Industry’s First Adaptive Data Preparation Platform
     C-Suite and Trust Both Affect Financial Returns on Analytics, Big Data
     Meeting a VAST challenge – Lincoln Laboratory staff create winning visualization
 
 
 
 
 
i6How Big Data Is Changing Science (and Society)

Traditional statistical approaches that long dominated scientific research are being challenged and augmented by new approaches from the fields of big data and data science.

HOW CAN YOU PREDICT something without understanding it? Simple:

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My experience with data analytics-Strata Conference

Please join me at the Strata Conference/Hadoop World in New York next Tuesday, October 29th, as I talk about my years of experience with data analysis alongside the founders and executives of ClearStory Data. ClearStory Data is delivering a new solution that makes it simple for business users to find, combine and interactively analyze data … Read more

A Share the Data client project plan

Stephen McDaniel, Chief Data Officer AdvisoryHere’s an actual Share the Data project.  This is a simplification of a plan developed with a real client, with details changed to remove any identifying information.  While every project is unique, this is not an unusual engagement. Share the Data engagements range in length from 3 days to several weeks, depending on project complexity and client resource availability.

Background 

The client is approaching a key turning point in their operational history- going beyond traditional reporting with mainframe technologies to an advanced data warehouse with web-based reporting, dashboards, self-service analytics and even advanced analytics to optimize customer recruitment, operational management and improve the overall customer experience.

All of these areas are a dynamic, iterative undertaking with each area interlinked and interdependent.  It is critical that the management team at the client work to prioritize, fund and support each iterative phase of these projects.  Likewise, it is imperative that each phase of these projects show an acceptable rate of return (or greater!) for the time and money invested in these initiatives.  Better data and analytics are not an end in themselves, but rather a means to a more profitable and competitive company.

Objective

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Free Webinar—Analyzing Your Data With Excel:
Simple Steps for Actionable Results

Webinar_Freakalytics_Excel_Analytics_2013_small_spend
Recorded August 22nd, 2013

Do what you can with what you have where you are.
—THEODORE ROOSEVELT
Cowboy, soldier, historian and
26th President of the U.S.

Synopsis
Answer everyday business questions like an analyst with Microsoft Excel. This webinar is based on a selected set of techniques from The 7C’s of Data Analysis, as covered in our book, The Accidental Analyst: Show Your Data Who’s Boss. An abbreviated case study will be used to demonstrate common techniques that can start you on the course to analyzing data with Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010 or 2013.

This presentation is approximately 1 hour and 15 minutes in length.

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Free Webinar—Business analytics and more
with SAS Enterprise Guide

 
Recorded on July 10th, 2013
 
 
Business_analytics_SAS_Enterprise_Guide_predictive_model_600
 
 
True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of
uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.

–WINSTON CHURCHILL
Prime Minister of England during WWII

 
 
Synopsis
In this webinar, Stephen will analyze multiple real-world case studies using SAS Enterprise Guide by following the 7 C’s of Data Analysis. He will collect data from a range of sources, explore the data for common problems, apply quick data fixes, demonstrate best practices of visual analytics and use powerful predictive models that go beyond the limits of standard analysis techniques.
Click here for the full post and to register below

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