Embrace Open Source Analytics

Suppose you could implement an analytics platform with comprehensive out-of-the-box capabilities, a flexible programming environment, good visualization capabilities and a growing body of skilled users.  Suppose this platform leveraged a massively parallel architecture for high performance and scalability.  And suppose you could do this without investing in software fees.

You don’t have to suppose, because IBM Netezza helps you leverage the power and capability of R.

R is the best known open source analytics project, but there are many other open source analytics available, including the Data Mining Template Library, the dlib and Orange C++ libraries and the Java Data Mining Package.  In this article, we’ll focus on R.

There are three main reasons R should be part of your enterprise analytics architecture:

  • R has capabilities not available in commercial analytics software
  • Usage of R by analysts is growing rapidly
  • R’s total cost of ownership is attractive

R functionality is a superset of the functionality available in commercial analytics packages. There are currently 3,047 packages published in the CRAN repository, and almost 5,000 packages in all repositories worldwide.  Moreover, the number of available packages is growing rapidly.  While commercial software vendors must prioritize development effort towards features with predictable demand and broad appeal, R developers work under no such constraints.  As a result, new, cutting-edge and niche applications tend to be published in R before they are available in commercial packages.

A customer we’re working with in the life sciences industry wants to apply four new methods to their analytic toolkit.  This customer spends almost a billion dollars each year to run hundreds of thousands of experiments; very small improvements in precision directly impact this customer’s bottom line.  Right now, all of these new methods are available in R, and none are available in commercial packages.

Interest in R is growing exponentially.   According to the most recent Rexer Analytics survey, R is the preferred analytics package for more respondents than for any other analytic software.  R outperforms all other analytics packages on various measures of mindshare, including listserv activity, website popularity, page rank and blogging activity.

Some customers we work with express concerns that open source software may be full of bugs, trojan horses or other security risks.  This view is based on the mistaken belief that developers can publish anything they like in R.  In fact, the R Project has a highly-developed review and testing process, and well-defined procedures for bug tracking and fixing.  R’s large and highly engaged user community ensures that R packages receive as much scrutiny and testing as many commercial software packages.

Like many analytical packages, R performs calculations in memory, which limits the amount of data that can be used in analysis to the size of memory on the host.  IBM Netezza partner Revolution Analytics has developed a commercial version of R (Revolution R Enterprise) that combines the capability and value of open source R with the quality assurance and technical support of vendor-supported software.   Revolution has also developed a set of enhancements that enable R to scale to terabyte-sized problems.  The combination of Revolution R Enterprise and Netezza’s massively parallel architecture provides a truly scalable and high-performance analytics platform.

Open source analytics like R offer firms rich capabilities, a flexible platform and great value.   With Netezza and Revolution Analytics, R is a scalable and high performance platform.

Leverage the In-Database Capabilities of Analytic Software

Many analysts have a strong preference for commercial analytic workbenches such as SAS or SPSS.  Both packages are widely used, respected by analysts, and each has strong advocates.  The purpose of this article is to point out that analytic users can benefit from the performance and simplicity of IBM Netezza in-database analytics without abandoning their preferred interface.

Let’s start with SAS.  One of the most frequent complaints from IT organizations about SAS users is the propensity for users to require significant amounts of storage space for SAS data sets.  A leading credit card issuer, for example, reports that users have more than one hundred terabytes of SAS files – and the volume is growing rapidly.

But SAS users can store data tables in the Netezza appliance and run data preparation steps against those tables using the SAS Pass-Through Facility.  In addition to centralizing storage, reducing data movement and simplifying security, users can realize 100X improvements in program runtime.

In-database PROCs are another SAS feature.  SAS currently enables in-database execution of FREQ, MEANS, RANK, REPORT, SORT, SUMMARY, and TABULATE in a number of databases and data warehouse appliances, including Netezza.   For the user, database-enabled PROCs operate like any other SAS PROC — but instead of running on the server, the PROC runs in the database.

SAS supports a number of other in-database capabilities through SAS/ACCESS, including the ability to pass functions and formats to Netezza, the ability to create temporary tables and the ability to leverage Netezza’s bulk load/unload facility

SAS users can make calls to Netezza in-database functions by invoking Netezza In-Database Analytics through PROC SQL.  In-database functions are far more efficient for building analytic data sets, data cleansing and enhancement.  Customers who have implemented this approach have observed remarkable improvements in overall runtime: jobs that ran in hours now run in minutes.

SAS customers using SAS Enterprise Miner or SAS Model Manager can also benefit from SAS Scoring Accelerator.  Scoring Accelerator which SAS enables an Enterprise Miner user to export a scoring function that runs on Netezza.  This capability helps the organization avoid a custom programming task, and enables the analyst to easily hand off model scoring to a production operation.

IBM SPSS Modeler also offers the capability to work directly with database tables in Netezza; like SAS, it can be configured to minimize storage on the SPSS server.  Modeler also offers Pushback SQL capabilities, which enable the user to perform functions within the Netezza appliance, including table joins, aggregation, selections, sorting, field derivation, field projection and scoring.  While the in-database functional capabilities of the two packages are similar, SPSS accomplishes this entirely within the graphical environment of the Stream canvas.

As with SAS, SPSS Modeler users can leverage Netezza in-database analytics to build, score and store predictive models, either through custom nodes or out-of-the box integration in Release 15.0.  Again, a key difference between SAS and SPSS is that while SPSS Modeler surfaces Netezza in-database analytics through the graphical user environment, SAS users must have programming and SQL skills.

To summarize, leading commercial software packages like SAS and SPSS already offer the ability to manage files, perform data preparation, build models and run scoring processes entirely within the Netezza appliance.  Users of these tools can significantly improve runtime performance by leveraging these existing capabilities.

EMC Announces Partnership with Alpine Data Labs

Catching up on the news here.

The keyword in the title of this post is “announces”.  It’s not news that EMC partners with Alpine Data Labs.   Alpine Miner is a nifty product, but in the predictive analytics market Alpine is an ankle-biter compared to SAS, SPSS, Mathsoft and other vendors.   Greenplum and Alpine were sister companies funded by the same VC before EMC entered the picture.  When EMC acquired Greenplum, they passed on Alpine because (a) it didn’t fit into EMC’s all-things-data warehousing strategy, and (b) EMC didn’t want to mess up their new alliance with SAS.

SAS does not look kindly on alliance partners that compete with them; this is, in part, a knee-jerk response.  In the analytics software market, clients rarely switch from one vendor to another, and growth opportunities in the analytic tools market are limited.  Most of the action is in emerging users and analytic applications, where SAS’ core strengths don’t play as well.  Nevertheless, SAS expects to own every category in which it chooses to compete and expects its partners to go along even as SAS invades new territory.

After EMC acquired Greenplum, GP reps continued to work together on a “sell-with” basis in a kind of “stealth” partnership.

So it’s significant that EMC entered into a reseller agreement with Alpine and announced it to the world.  It’s a smart move by EMC; as I said earlier, Alpine is a nifty product. But it suggests that EMC isn’t getting the traction it expected from the SAS alliance — a view that’s supported by scuttlebutt from inside both SAS and EMC.

What Business Practices Enable Agile Analytics?

Part four in a four-part series.

We’ve mentioned some of the technical innovations that support an Agile approach to analytics; there are also business practices to consider.   Some practices in Agile software development apply equally well to analytics as any other project, including the need for a sustainable development pace; close collaboration; face-to-face conversation; motivated and trustworthy contributors, and continuous attention to technical excellence.  Additional practices pertinent to analytics include:

  • Commitment to open standards architecture
  • Rigorous selection of the right tool for the task
  • Close collaboration between analysts and IT
  • Focus on solving the client’s business problem

More often than not, customers with serious cycle time issues are locked into closed single-vendor architecture.  Lacking an open architecture to interface with data at the front end and back end of the analytics workflow, these organizations are forced into treating the analytics tool as a data management tool and decision engine; this is comparable to using a toothbrush to paint your house.  Server-based analytic software packages are very good at analytics, but perform poorly as databases and decision engines.

Agile analysts take a flexible, “best-in-class” approach to solving the problem at hand.  No single vendor offers “best-in-class” tools for every analytic method and algorithm.  Some vendors, like KXEN, offer unique algorithms that are unavailable from other vendors; others, like Salford Systems, have specialized experience and intellectual property that enables them to offer a richer feature set for certain data mining methods.  In an Agile analytics environment, analysts freely choose among commercial, open source and homegrown software, using a mashup of tools as needed.

While it may seem like a platitude to call for collaboration between an organization’s analytics community and the IT organization, we frequently see customers who have developed complex processes for analytics that either duplicate existing IT processes, or perform tasks that can be done more efficiently by IT. Analysts should spend their time doing analysis, not data movement, management, enhancement, cleansing or scoring; but surveyed analysts typically report that they spend much of their time performing these tasks.  In some cases, this is because IT has failed to provide the needed support; in other cases, the analytics team insists on controlling the process.   Regardless of the root cause, IT and analytics leadership alike need to recognize the need for collaboration, and an appropriate division of labor.

Focusing the analytics effort on the client’s business problem is essential for the practice of Agile analytics.  Organizations frequently get stuck on issues that are difficult to resolve because the parties are focused on different goals; in the analytics world, this takes the form of debates over tools, methods and procedures.  Analysts should bear in mind that clients are not interested in winning prizes for the “best” model, and they don’t care about the analyst’s advanced degrees.   Business requires speed, agility and clarity, and analysts who can’t deliver on these expectations will not survive.

What Is Driving Interest in Agile Analytics?

Part three in a four-part series.

A combination of market forces and technical innovation drive interest in Agile methods for analytics:

  • Clients require more timely and actionable analytics
  • Data warehouses have reduced latency in the data used by predictive models
  • Innovation directly impacts the analytic workflow itself

Business requirements for analytics are changing rapidly, and clients demand predictive analytics that can support decisions today.  For example, consider direct marketing:  ten years ago, firms relied mostly on direct mail and outbound telemarketing; marketing campaigns were served by batch-oriented systems, and analytic cycle times were measured in months or even years.  Today, firms have shifted that marketing spend to email, web media and social media, where cycle times are measured in days, hours or even minutes.  The analytics required to support these channels are entirely different, and must operate at a digital cadence.

Organizations have also substantially reduced the latency built into data warehouses.  Ten years ago, analysts frequently worked with monthly snapshot data, delivered a week or more into the following month.  While this is still the case for some organizations, data warehouses with daily, inter-day and real-time updates are increasingly common.  A predictive model score is as timely as the data it consumes; as firms drive latency from data warehousing processes, analytical processes are exposed as cumbersome and slow.

Numerous innovations in analytics create the potential to reduce cycle time:

  • In-database analytics eliminate the most time-consuming tasks, data marshalling and model scoring
  • Tighter database integration by vendors such as SAS and SPSS enable users to achieve hundred-fold runtime improvements for front-end processing
  • Enhancements to the PMML standard make it possible for firms to integrate a wide variety of end-user analytic tools with high performance data warehouses

All of these factors taken together add up to radical reductions in time to deployment for predictive models.  Organizations used to take a year or more to build and deploy models; a major credit card issuer I worked with in the 1990s needed two years to upgrade its behavior scorecards.  Today, IBM Netezza customers who practice Agile methods can reduce this cycle to a day or less.

What Is Agile Analytics?

This post is the second in a four-part series.

Agile Analytics is an approach to predictive analytics that emphasizes:

  • Client satisfaction through rapid delivery of usable predictions
  • Focus on model performance when deployed “in market”
  • Iterative and evolutionary approach to model development
  • Rapid cycle time through radical reduction in time to deployment

The Agile approach focuses on the client’s end goal: using data-driven predictions to make better decisions that impact the business.  In contrast, conventional approaches to predictive modeling (such as the well-known SEMMA[1] model) tend to focus on the model development process, with minimal attention given to either the client’s business problem or how the model will be deployed.

Since Agile Analytics is most concerned with how well the predictive model supports the client’s decision-making process, the analyst evaluates the model based on how well it serves this purpose when deployed under market conditions.  In practice, this means that the analyst evaluates model accuracy in production together with score latency, deployment cost and interpretability – a critical factor when building predictive analytics into a human process.   Conventional approaches typically evaluate predictive models solely on model accuracy when back-tested on a sample, a measure that often overstates the accuracy that the model will achieve when deployed under market conditions.

Agile analysts stress rapid deployment and iterative learning; they assume that the knowledge produced from tracking an initial model after it is deployed enables enhancements in subsequent iterations, and they build this expectation into the modeling process.  An Agile analyst quickly develops a predictive model using fast, robust methods and available data, deploys the model, monitors the model in production and improves it as soon as possible.  A conventional analyst tends to take extra time perfecting an initial model prior to deployment, and may pay no attention to in-market performance unless the client complains about anomalies.

Reducing cycle time is critical for the Agile analyst, since every iteration produces new knowledge.  The Agile analyst aggressively looks for ways to reduce the time needed to develop and deploy models, and factors cycle time into the choice of analytic methods.  Conventional analysts are often strikingly unengaged with what happens outside of the model development task; larger analytic teams often delegate tasks like data marshalling, cleansing and scoring to junior members, who perform the “grunt” work with programming tools.

[1] Sample, Explore, Modify, Model, Assess

Agile Analytics: Overview

Is this the year of Agile Analytics?  Recent publications show growing interest in the application of Agile methods to analytics:

  • Ken Collier, an Agile pioneer, tackles analytics in his aptly named new book Agile Analytics .
  • A quick Google search surfaces a number of recent blogs and articles (here, here and here)
  • Curt Monash recently published an excellent two-part blog on the subject (here and here)

I’ve commented in the past on IBM’s Big Data Hub about techniques that contribute to Agile Analytics, such as in-database analytics, open source analytics and tighter integration with commercial packages like SAS.  In addition, I’ve commented on some of the barriers to agility, such as limitations of the PMML standard.

In this series, I’ll cover these topics

(1) What is Agile Analytics?

(2) What’s driving interest in Agile Analytics?

(3) What business practices enable Agile Analytics?