For a full write up of Tim’s work, check out James Taylor’s PAW 2009 summary or head over to Tim’s data mining blog.

For businesses, this is a great opportunity to find out what is available by having others suggest new ideas and methods, or even to test your internally deployed models against the best of the best. So if you’re a business who has data, please consider being invloved! For further details, see the competition webpage.

[via Slashdot]

Update: For more R news, see also Ajay Ohri’s interview with Dr Graham Williams, the author of Rattle.

The built in tutorial is a really good way to get a grasp of the system and I highly recommend spending some time on this if you are interested in learning RapidMiner. I would also recommend a series of RapidMiner video turtorials over at Neural Market Trends that are worth checking out too.

RapidMiner 4.3 includes a 3D lift chart

• Make Sure Your Insight is Insightful: Analytical Marketing at NAB by Antony Ugoni (National Australia Bank)
• Model Deployment and Management – The ATO Story by Warwick Graco (Australian Taxation Office)
• Putting Cheques in Place to Identify Fraud by Dr Paul Bracewell (Offlode NZ) and Flavio Palaci (Marsh Australia)
• Customer Value Creation Using Analytics by Arun VS (Satyam)
• Analysing Performance and Tuning your SAS Application by Bill Gibson (SAS)

[via KDnuggets]

Private health insurer HCF has implemented a predictive analytics suite to help weed out fraudulent claims, target individual members and streamline the monotonous labour of data analysis.

Researchers from University of Calgary claim that the next evolution of will be smart SPAM, which will infiltrate your computer via spyware/viruses and ‘mine’ your emails. By creating emails based on the your actual messages you’ve previously sent, the spammers hope they will be more believable to readers.

I would argue, however, that such a situation would merely make services Gmail, more attractive. Firstly because they have a truly massive body of knowledge to use to fine tune their spam filters, and secondly because it is unlikely such spyware could infiltrate a web-based system. Even if a program was distributed that waited for someone to log on and then took over, Google could have it effectively neutralised in a matter of hours.

Stanford’s software in action: Input from GPS and many sensors feed the algorithms to determine the safe path (see tech report).

1. Install “email” (Gentoo users: emerge net-mail/email)
2. Edit /etc/email/email.conf (Gentoo users: as a minimum you must set REPLY_TO)
3. Test the commands. They are:
   cd /path/to/your/thesis/
tar -czf /tmp/thesis.tar.gz *.*
email --blank-mail --smtp-server mail.yourserver.com –from-name “your name” –from-addr you@youremail.com –subject “Cron: Thesis Backup (`date`)” you@gmail.com –attach /tmp/thesis.tar.gz > /dev/null 2>&1
rm -f /tmp/thesis.tar.gz

4. Now add this as a /etc/crontab entry. This example sends the backup at 7am each day.
   0 7 * * * unixusername cd /path/to/your/thesis/; tar -czf /tmp/thesis.tar.gz *.*; email –blank-mail –smtp-server mail.yourserver.com –from-name “your name” –from-addr you@youremail.com –subject “Cron: Thesis Backup (`date`)” you@gmail.com –attach /tmp/thesis.tar.gz > /dev/null 2>&1; rm -f /tmp/thesis.tar.gz

5. Final step is to create a Gmail filter! It would be nice if it was possible to stop the emails being downloaded via POP but I think this may require a filter that moves the incoming backup emails to Trash.

Obviously you don’t have to use this for backing up a thesis, it could easily be modified to backup whatever you want.
Note: I can’t see mention of TLS support in the client email, so that’s why I’ve suggested you use your own SMTP server rather than Google’s.

Library support is on the way, too. At the moment though, I could only find the National Library of Australia and Deakin University, but the level of integration is very promising.

Tip: Maintaining your BibTeX reference database can be a pain sometimes. When using Google Scholar, make sure you enable BibTeX export in the preferences, it will save you heaps of time. Even when you already have the PDF, it is easy to do quick search, click “Import into BibTeX” then the entry into copy & paste into your .bib file. There is a slight bug with the field “authors” instead of “author” but that is easy to fix on the fly.

The package contains a documentclass called “presentation” which takes as an argument a slide style. The package also provides a simple python program that can interpret SVG files generated by Inkscape and build a slide style, usable by the “presentation” document class, directly from it. This means that creating new custom slide designs is as simple as drawing what you want your slides to look like in Inkscape.

LaTeX based presentation are handy when you want nice looking equations on your slides. Other good alternatives are Beamer and Prosper.