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Thu, 17 May 2012 21:12:00 -0500
STATISTICA cited in prestigious journal
Mon, 14 May 2012 14:05:00 -0500
What American Women Do For Work, via NPR
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In a review article in the December, 2004 issue of Scientific Computing World, Felix Grant offers praises for the latest release of STATISTICA (7.0). During a consulting project at a large plant engaged in manufacturing milled steel containers, Mr. Grant found STATISTICA well suited for large-scale projects. He also writes that STATISTICA gains "new analytic dimensions in release" (including the new advanced modules) as well as the new "project organisation; extension of spreadsheet behaviour, and metadata provision". Also noted were features such as extended brushing facilities, and enhanced access to analytic text operations. When commenting on STATISTICA's adaptability Grant writes that it is "Always very flexibly configurable, the working environment becomes even more so."
Grant also praises the power of STATISTICA Data Miner (including Text Miner) applications, which - despite his initial reluctance to embrace the general data mining approach - have managed to "convert" him: "it [STATISTICA Data Miner] allows a lot of ground to be opened up to intuition, very quickly generating a useful volume of possibilities for closer examination by more traditional means." When using STATISTICA Text Miner in the real-life application, the program allowed him "to trawl for clues through records such as memos, reports and so on - in fact, almost anything on the plant network - and that was, in the event, how one vital piece of the jigsaw was found."
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Felix Grant, a respected lecturer and reviewer in the UK, recently wrote an article for Scientific Computing World on the background and use of text mining and gave praise to StatSoft's STATISTICA Text Miner. He says of StatSoft, "(StatSoft) inspires confidence by not overselling what its products can do; and that confidence carries over into the implementation."
Here are some direct quotes from the article that give an idea of Grant's thoughts on Text Miner:
"STATISTICA Text Miner (in full, Text Mining and Document Retrieval, but hereafter Text Miner) is conservative, though not falsely modest, in its claims, all of which are based on well-known and verifiable methods"
"These tailored rules are an investment of expensive, skilled time and are very dependent on linguistic register, so we welcomed the discovery that they can be saved for subsequent reuse"
"The software has to be able to visit the documents in question, and Text Miner can take directories full of specified source files, locally or remotely located, crawling along links as required, chewing up the contents and spitting out a frequency matrix with commendable speed."
"STATISTICA, as always, prefers an open-hand philosophy of providing the tools and the good advice, then leaving the usage to the user."
"In fact, though, despite my initial suspicions, which diverted us into extensive, early control testing, Text Miner copes well with this."
In his recent article "How to Choose a Data Mining Suite", Dr. Robert A. Nisbet reviews five popular data mining suites to help companies evaluate which suite is best for their particular needs, including STATISTICA Data Miner, SPSS-Clementine, Affinium Model, Insightful Miner, and KXEN.
The article contains an extremely detailed comparison of procedures and features of these five products on over 100 dimensions (with a detailed table reproduced in the article), concluded with the final composite scores. STATISTICA Data Miner has received a total score of 1,147 (almost two times higher than its closest competitor, SPSS Clementine).
Referring to his comprehensive table showing a weighted comparison of the features and functions of the different tools, Dr. Nisbet notes that by comparing the relatively moderate cost and the weighted score across all features and functions, STATISTICA Data Miner is "the clear winner" and is "in a class by itself". He goes on to state that "no data mining suite available today provides more tools for performing data mining projects" and proclaims STATISTICA Data Miner as his "personal favorite" among the tools he evaluated.
Dr. Nisbet lists the pros of STATISTICA Data Miner, including "the richest combination of parametric statistical and machine learning data mining algorithms", "highly flexible tools for model output", "powerful tools for reduction of dimensionality", and "scalability (STATISTICA Data Miner can more rapidly process larger data sets both in terms of their dimensionality and the overall size than the other products)".
Dr. Nisbet has over 30 years experience in complex systems analysis and modeling as a Research Professor (University of California, Santa Barbara) and as consultant in data mining sciences. While at NCR Corporation and Torrent Systems, he pioneered the design and development of configurable data mining applications for retail sales forecasting, and Churn, Propensity-to-buy, and Customer Acquisition in Telecommunications and Insurance.
Click here to read Dr. Nisbet's table of results in pdf format.
"An important factor driving the decision in favor of STATISTICA was that the program not only offers data mining algorithms, but also a very wide spectrum of general analytic procedures."
"Data Mining is one of the acknowledged technologies for successful CRM. To analyze information, it is important to have fast access to the available data. Our STATISTICA software provides efficient interfaces to all common databases. In addition, results of analyses must be provided in a format that is readily interpreted and easily understood. For that purpose, our software provides flexible reporting methods, including WebPortal technologies. "
"StatSoft has been developing software for 20 years, consistently leveraging the most modern state-of-the-art technologies. The products provide an intuitive menu-driven user-interface, but the analytic procedures and software can also be completely automated and scripted, for seamless integration with existing ERP-, LIMS-, and other knowledge repository or database management systems. The server version of STATISTICA is scalable and fully Web-enabled, providing access to all methods offered in the software via simple Web Browser. The validated product is compliant and suitable for installation in FDA regulated industries, for validated applications."