I’m almost back!  I’m easing my way back into posting again as work somewhat quiets down.  Thank you so much for your emails and comments while I was away.  I’m still terribly busy with engineering work but I promise I’ll try to answer all your questions and comments over the course of the next week.

On a side and exciting note, I will be giving a talk at the very first Rapidminer Conference 2010 in Germany this September!  The RM Team have put up a tentative schedule at www.rcomm2010.org and its looking to be 4 exciting days of training, talks, and workshops about our favorite, and powerful, open source data modeling suite.

I hope my readers can make it there between September 13th and 16th!  It would be nice to meet you and finally meet the RM team! I hope that my liver doesn’t give out when I there! =)

Thanks for sticking around and I hope to start posting again in a few months, probably after the summer.

That’s a great question and the answer is, “well I just choose those parameters to illustrate my point for the video.”  While this answer is not at all satisfying to the astute reader/viewer, it does lead us to ask the most important question of all, “what are the right parameters to choose?”

This can be answered very well if you were to use Rapidminer’s Parameter Optimization operator in your initial data discovery phase.  This operator allows you to choose some or all of the parameters in your experiment and iterate different values for them to meet some specific requirement on your part (i.e. performance).

For example, if you were using the Neural Net operator and didn’t know what to set your learning and momentum parameters to, to get the best classification accuracy, you would use the Parameter Optimization operator to interate different combinations of those parameters to find the best accuracy.

Once the Parameter Optimization operator determines those values, you can input them into your experiment and truly optimize your model for performance! See below for an actual output from a parameter optimization model I’m working on.  You can see that Rapidminer indicated that  momentum of 0.3 and a learning rate of 0.6 was the best parameter settings to maximize the accuracy rate and minimize the classification error.

While is operator is a fantastic feature (they got evolutionary optimizers too!) for us data modelers, its a massive computer resource suck.  I would advise anyone using this operator to have a very powerful server or computer, with oodles of memory, to run your iterations.

FYI, I plan on going over a short parameter optimization example in upcoming webinar.

I plan on going over a few of my video tutorials in more detail for the webinar course and will provide a long Q&A session to boot!  Of course I can answer any other general questions you might have about Rapidminer and applications for it.

It should be noted that this will not be a free webinar!  I do plan on charging for it, but I will provide an “early sign up” incentive that will be reasonable.

Yes, you read right.  I’ve joined forces with the Rapid-I team and became a partner company with them to help spread the word and evangelize about Rapidminer, and their other exciting products too.

What does this mean for you?  It means that I’ll be focusing on using Rapidminer exclusively on this blog from now on and hopefully roll out some new and exciting features over the course of the year.  I have a lot of things cooking right now that I’m not a liberty to post about right now, but 2010 is shaping up to be a good year for my loyal readers!

Stef did a fantastic job and helped me translate my vision for the Neural Market Trends brand into an elegant logo.  She’s professional, responsive, and her graphic design skills are great.  I highly recommend her for your future blog work or other graphic design needs!  Big Thanks Stefenie!

Check out her blog to see some more of her talent!

It would appear that there is a turning point in the market every 12 days or so.  Very interesting and this model definitely requires more analysis by yours truly…

This video can be viewed in HQ by clicking this link here.  Please make sure you have Quicktime or another MP4 capable reader installed in your browser.

I created these forum to serve as knowledge base (an idea lab) for financial experiments using Rapidminer, and solely for my readers.

Registration is open and feel free to post your questions!