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“With all of the Big Data tools what is the right one for me?” This is a question I invariably get asked or hear asked at every Meetup I attend, or every time I talk to a manager about Big Data. As a consultant this is a question that my clients depend on me to help answer. This is also a very complicated question with no single answer. Answering this question requires asking many questions. The first and most important is, do you need Big Data tools? This is often overlooked, but are your current data...Read more

Over the past six weeks, OpenBI’s been a part of the just-completed Tableau 8.0 Roadshow that presented in cities across the country. If our sample of five shows is at all representative, Tableau 8.0 will assuredly be a hit. Nice timing with a pending IPO. I’ve been a big Tableau fan over five years. For exploratory visualization that’s at the heart of both advanced analytics and data science, Tableau’s top shelf. Its intuitive, easy-to-navigate interface, powerful “small multiples” visualizations and far-...Read more

I’m pretty down on economists these days. Actually, it’s “authoritative” public-policy macroeconomists that most invoke my ire. I’m not as bad as Nassim Taleb though. Among Taleb’s many econo-bombs, one from “ Fooled by Randomness ,” the first of his best-selling trilogy, is a favorite: “Economists are evaluated on how intelligent they sound, not on a scientific measure of their knowledge of reality.” Relatedly, I have two beefs with policy-promoting macroeconomists. The first is that many consider their...Read more

We've got one more stop on the Tableau 8.0 Roadshow and it's in our hometown, Chicago. As a proud sponsor of the Tableau 8.0 Roadshow, OpenBI has been having a blast touring cities and sharing our experiences using Tableau. Tableau software has become a critical component of OpenBI’s typical architecture to organize and maximize your data’s potential. We'll share our stories of how we've helped customers maximize Tableau's many benefits. Learn what’s new, attend breakout sessions, get hands-on training,...Read more

I’m still reeling from the provocative but important new book, “ Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How Live, Work and Think ,” co-authored by Oxford professor Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Economist editor Kenneth Cukier, that I twice blogged on a few weeks back. As I noted then: “I must admit my traditional statistical grounding has taken a hit with Big Data . The notions that the core scientific method techniques of sampling, measurement error, and the experimental method’s cause and effect, may...Read more

I recently participated in two of the four sessions of the just-completed webinar series: “The Evolution of Regression Modeling: from Classical Linear Regression to Modern Ensembles” from Salford Systems. The odd-numbered sessions, which I sat through, provide the conceptual background for statistical learning from a regression perspective, in which an independent or response variable is predicted from a set of dependent, predictor or feature variables. Sessions two and four present illustrations of the...Read more

Hadoop is a batch oriented system in which it takes minutes or sometimes even hours to get data out of Hadoop. This makes Hadoop a very challenging tool for data exploration and analysis since having to wait fifteen minutes for the answer to every question is too long. Often by the time you have an answer you forgot what question was you were asking. This has led to the emergence of sub-second SQL on Hadoop tools in the past 12 to 18 months. I classify these tools into two basic categories; SQL natively on...Read more

Last week’s blog introduced a new book, “ Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How Live, Work and Think ,” I like a lot. Starting from the current obsession with datafication – “taking information about all things under the sun…and transforming it into a data format to make it quantified” – Big Data identifies three major developments, incredibly large data sets, acceptance of messy data, and a tolerance for correlation in lieu of causation, as drivers of the revolution. From Big Data’s perspective,...Read more