Revolution Analytics
Analysis of Revolution Analytics and its efforts related to the R analytical language. Related subjects include:
- Statistics and predictive modeling
- Business intelligence
- Open source
- (in The Monash Report) Data mining (older posts)
- (in Text Technologies) SAS’ offerings in text mining
Notes on predictive modeling, October 10, 2014
As planned, I’m getting more active in predictive modeling. Anyhow …
1. I still believe most of what I said in a July, 2013 predictive modeling catch-all post. However, I haven’t heard as much subsequently about Ayasdi as I had expected to.
2. The most controversial part of that post was probably the claim:
I think the predictive modeling state of the art has become:
- Cluster in some way.
- Model separately on each cluster.
In particular:
- It is always possible to instead go with a single model formally.
- A lot of people think accuracy, ease-of-use, or both are better served by a true single-model approach.
- Conversely, if you have a single model that’s pretty good, it’s natural to look at the subset of the data for which it works poorly and examine that first. Voila! You’ve just done a kind of clustering.
3. Nutonian is now a client. I just had my first meeting with them this week. To a first approximation, they’re somewhat like KXEN (sophisticated math, non-linear models, ease of modeling, quasi-automagic feature selection), but with differences that start: Read more
| Categories: Ayasdi, Databricks, Spark and BDAS, Log analysis, Nutonian, Predictive modeling and advanced analytics, Revolution Analytics, Scientific research, Web analytics | 9 Comments |
How Revolution Analytics parallelizes R
I talked tonight with Lee Edlefsen, Chief Scientist of Revolution Analytics, and now think I understand Revolution’s parallel R much better than I did before.
There are four primary ways that people try to parallelize predictive modeling:
- They can run the same algorithm on different parts of a dataset on different nodes, then return all the results, and claim they’ve parallelized. This is trivial and not really a solution. It is also the last-ditch fallback position for those who parallelize more seriously.
- They can generate intermediate results from different parts of a dataset on different nodes, then generate and return a single final result. This is what Revolution does.
- They can parallelize the linear algebra that underlies so many algorithms. Netezza and Greenplum tried this, but I don’t think it worked out very well in either case. Lee cited a saying in statistical computing “If you’re using matrices, you’re doing it wrong”; he thinks shortcuts and workarounds are almost always the better way to go.
- They can jack up the speed of inter-node communication, perhaps via MPI (Messaging Passing Interface), so that full parallelization isn’t needed. That’s SAS’ main approach.
One confusing aspect of this discussion is that it could reference several heavily-overlapping but not identical categories of algorithms, including:
- External memory algorithms, which operates on datasets too big to fit in main memory, by — for starters — reading in and working on a part of the data at a time. Lee observes that these are almost always parallelizable.
- What Revolution markets as External Memory Algorithms, which are those external memory algorithms it has gotten around to implementing so far. These are all parallelized. They are also all in the category of …
- … algorithms that can be parallelized by:
- Operating on data in parts.
- Getting intermediate results.
- Combining them in some way for a final result.
- Algorithms of the previous category, where the way of combining them specifically is in the form of summation, such as those discussed in the famous paper Map-Reduce for Machine Learning on Multicore. Not all of Revolution’s current parallel algorithms fall into this group.
To be clear, all Revolution’s parallel algorithms are in Category #2 by definition and Category #3 in practice. However, they aren’t all in Category #4.
| Categories: Greenplum, Hadoop, MapReduce, Netezza, Parallelization, Predictive modeling and advanced analytics, Revolution Analytics, Teradata | Leave a Comment |
Trends in predictive modeling
I talked with Teradata about a bunch of stuff yesterday, including this week’s announcements in in-database predictive modeling. The specific news was about partnerships with Fuzzy Logix and Revolution Analytics. But what I found more interesting was the surrounding discussion. In a nutshell:
- Teradata is finally seeing substantial interest in in-database modeling, rather than just in-database scoring (which has been important for years) and in-database data preparation (which is a lot like ELT — Extract/Load/transform).
- Teradata is seeing substantial interest in R.
- It seems as if similar groups of customers are interested in both parts of that, such as:
- Usual-suspect consumer marketing sectors (telecom, credit card, retail).*
- Semiconductor manufacturing.**
- Parallelized SAS modeling on Teradata seems to be limited by the small number of algorithms that are parallelized. (SAS scoring, I presume, is a different matter.)
This is the strongest statement of perceived demand for in-database modeling I’ve heard. (Compare Point #3 of my July predictive modeling post.) And fits with what I’ve been hearing about R.
| Categories: EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Parallelization, Predictive modeling and advanced analytics, Revolution Analytics, SAS Institute, Telecommunications, Teradata | 1 Comment |
Cloudera Hadoop strategy and usage notes
When we scheduled a call to talk about Sentry, Cloudera’s Charles Zedlewski and I found time to discuss other stuff as well. One interesting part of our discussion was around the processing “frameworks” Cloudera sees as most important.
- The four biggies are:
- MapReduce. Duh.
- SQL, specifically Impala. This is as opposed to the uneasy Hive/MapReduce layering.
- Search.
- “Math” , which seems to mainly be through partnerships with SAS and Revolution Analytics. I don’t know a lot about how these work, but I presume they bypass MapReduce, in which case I could imagine them greatly outperforming Mahout.
- Stream processing (Storm) is next in line.
- Graph — e.g. Giraph — rises to at least the proof-of-concept level. Again, the hope would be that this well outperforms graph-on-MapReduce.
- Charles is also seeing at least POC interest in Spark.
- But MPI (Message Passing Interface) on Hadoop isn’t going anywhere fast, except to the extent it’s baked into SAS or other “math” frameworks. Generic MPI use cases evidently turn out to be a bad fit for Hadoop, due to factors such as:
- Low data volumes.
- Latencies in various parts of the system
HBase was artificially omitted from this “frameworks” discussion because Cloudera sees it as a little bit more of a “storage” system than a processing one.
Another good subject was offloading work to Hadoop, in a couple different senses of “offload”: Read more
Quick-turnaround predictive modeling
Last November, I wrote two posts on agile predictive analytics. It’s time to return to the subject. I’m used to KXEN talking about the ability to do predictive modeling, very quickly, perhaps without professional statisticians; that the core of what KXEN does. But I was surprised when Revolution Analytics told me a similar story, based on a different approach, because ordinarily that’s not how R is used at all.
Ultimately, there seem to be three reasons why you’d want quick turnaround on your predictive modeling: Read more
| Categories: Business intelligence, Investment research and trading, KXEN, Predictive modeling and advanced analytics, Revolution Analytics, Telecommunications, Web analytics | 10 Comments |
Revolution Analytics update
I wasn’t too impressed when I spoke with Revolution Analytics at the time of its relaunch last year. But a conversation Thursday evening was much clearer. And I even learned some cool stuff about general predictive modeling trends (see the bottom of this post).
Revolution Analytics business and business model highlights include:
- Revolution Analytics is an open-core vendor built around the R language. That is, Revolution Analytics offers proprietary code and support, with subscription pricing, that help in the use of open source software.
- Unlike most open-core vendors I can think of, Revolution Analytics takes little responsibility for the actual open source part. Some “grants” for developing certain open source R pieces seem to be the main exception. While this has caused some hard feelings, I don’t have an accurate sense for their scope or severity.
- Revolution Analytics also sells a single-user/workstation version of its product, freely admitting that this is mainly a lead generation strategy or, in my lingo, a “break-even leader.”
- Revolution Analytics boasts around 100 customers, split about 70-30 between the workstation seeding stuff and the real server product.
- Revolution Analytics has “about” 37 employees. Headquarters are at 101 University Avenue (do I have to say in what city? 🙂 ). There are also a development office in Seattle and a sales office in New York.
- Revolution Analytics’ pricing is by size of server. “Small” servers — i.e. up to 12 cores — start at $25K/year.
- Unsurprisingly, adoption is more alongside SAS et al. than rip-and-replace.
| Categories: Health care, Investment research and trading, Open source, Parallelization, Predictive modeling and advanced analytics, Pricing, Revolution Analytics, SAS Institute | 2 Comments |
Revolution Analytics seems very confused
Revolution Analytics is a relaunch of a company previously known as REvolution Computing, built around the open source R language. Last week they sent around email claiming they were a new company (false), and asking for briefings in connection with an embargo this morning. I talked to Revolution Analytics yesterday, and they told me the embargo had been moved to Thursday.* However, Revolution apparently neglected to tell the press the same thing, and there’s an article out today — quoting me, because I’d given quotes in line with the original embargo, before I’d had the briefing myself. And what’s all this botched timing about? Mainly, it seems to be for a “statement of direction” about software Revolution Analytics hasn’t actually developed yet.
*More precisely, they spoke as if the embargo had been Thursday all along.