Analytics Team

Part of BMW Oracle’s upper hand in the most recent America’s Cup may have come from the use of data mining. The boat and all its sensors can generate 2,500 data points 10 times per second. Check out this article from the Oracle Data Mining and Analytics blog to read the rest.

This Boing Boing article questions whether the US military may be gathering data from unsuspecting teens and using it for data mining exercises to improve recruiting.

With the first Netflix Prize coming to a conclusion, Netflix has announced Netflix Prize 2. This one will be shorter than the first with prizes being awarded after 6 and 18 months. Here’s an article from O’Reilly with more info.

In the past, most executives have viewed data management as a necessary but boring cost they must tolerate. The newest DM News Data Management Survey indicates that this is starting to change.
Here’s the article. And here’s the full survey.

Pig is an open source platform for analyzing large data sets that works in conjunction with Hadoop clusters and Map-Reduce jobs. They recently announced their 0.20 release featuring a 5X performance gain over the previous version. Check out the details.

Rexer Analytics is just about to close their data mining survey and could use your input. The link from the Oracle data mining blog will give you the code you need to participate. After the survey, you can access previous versions of the compiled survey results.

Various groups within a company have adopted new technologies at different rates with Human Resources not know for leading the way. A Business Week article outlines how HR is now starting to leverage data mining to improve it’s
Analyzing employees’ noverbal communication to identify who are the ones good at sharing information and who [...]

The Data Mining Blog put together a great diagram showing how the tons of publicly available data feeds could possibly linked together for a new type of analysis. Also check out linkeddata.org.

ClickZ put together two great articles about data mining and predictive analytics related to web behavior data.
Part 1: organizing the data, using tools, aggregations, cutting through the noise
Part 2: understanding behavior over multiple sessions

The New York Times has picked up on the increasing popularity of the open source analytics and data mining software, R.