Online PMML Course @ UCSD Extension: Register today!

The Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML) standard is touted as the standard for predictive analytics and data mining models. It is allows for predictive models built in one application to be moved to another without any re-coding. PMML has become the imperative for companies wanting to extract value and insight from Big Data. In the Big Data era, the agile deployment of predictive models is imperative. Given the volume and velocity associated with Big Data, one cannot spend weeks or months re-coding a predictive model into the IT operational environment where it actually produces value (the fourth V in Big Data).

Also, as predictive models become more complex through the use of random forest models, model ensembles, and deep learning neural networks, PMML becomes even more relevant since model recoding is simply not an option.

Zementis has paired up with UCSD Extension to offer the first online PMML course. This is a great opportunity for individuals and companies alike to master PMML so that they can muster their predictive analytics resources around a single standard and in doing so, benefit from all it can offer.

http://extension.ucsd.edu/studyarea/index.cfm?vAction=singleCourse&vCourse=CSE-41184

Course Benefits

• Learn how to represent an entire data mining solution using open-standards
• Understand how to use PMML effectively as a vehicle for model logging, versioning and deployment
• Identify and correct issues with PMML code as well as add missing computations to auto-generated PMML code

Course Dates

07/14/14 - 08/25/14

PMML is supported by most commercial and open-source data mining tools. Companies and tools that support PMML include IBM SPSS, SAS, R, SAP KXEN, Zementis, KNIME, RapidMiner, FICO, StatSoft, Angoss, Microstrategy ... The standard itself is very mature and its latest release is version 4.2.

For more details about PMML, please visit the Zementis PMML Resources page.

Zementis and SAP HANA: Real-time Scoring for Big Data

The Zementis partnership with SAP is manifesting itself in a number of ways. Two weeks ago we were part of the SAP Big Data Bus parked outside Wells Fargo in San Francisco. This week, we would like to share with you three new developments.

1) ADAPA is not being offered at the SAP HANA Marketplace.

2) An interview with our CEO, Mike Zeller, was just featured by SAP on the SAP Blogs.


3) Zementis was again part of the SAP Big Data Bus and the "Big Data Theatre". This time, the bus was parked outside US Bank in Englewood, Colorado. We were engaged in a myriad of conversations with the many people that came through the bus about how ADAPA and SAP HANA work together to bring predictive analytics and real-time scoring to transactional data and millions of accounts, in any industry.

Visit the Zementis ADAPA for SAP HANA page for more details on the Zementis and SAP real-time solution for predictive analytics.

Real-time scoring of transactional data with ADAPA for SAP HANA

At the recent DEMO Enterprise 2014 conference, Zementis announced its participation in the SAP® Startup Focus program and launched ADAPA for SAP HANA, a standards-based predictive analytics scoring engine. 

ADAPA for SAP HANA provides a simple plug-and-play platform to deploy the most complex predictive models and execute them in real-time, even in the context of Big Data.

In joining the SAP HANA Startup Focus program, Zementis set out to address two key challenges related to the operational deployment of predictive analytics:  Agile deployment and scalable execution.

Transactional data has for years pushed the boundaries of predictive analytics. The financial industry, for example, has been using transactional data to detect fraud and abuse for decades with complex custom solutions. Real-time scoring is paramount for companies to be able to predict and prevent fraudulent activity before it actually happens.  Likewise, the Internet of Things (IoT) demands effective processing of sensor data to employ predictive maintenance for detecting issues before they turn into device failures.

To solve these challenges, Zementis combined its ADAPA predictive analytics scoring engine with SAP HANA in a true plug-and-play platform which is universally applicable across all industries.  ADAPA to serve scoring requests and execute predictive models, HANA to offload complex model preprocessing and computation of aggregates.

In this scenario, real-time execution critically depends on HANA serving complex data lookups and aggregate profile computation in a few milliseconds.  In a high-volume environment, such aggregates or lookups may have to be computed over millions of transactions.

ADAPA provides scalable real-time scoring of the core model, plus agility for model deployment through the Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML) industry standard.  Clients are able to instantly deploy existing predictive models from various data mining tools.  For example, you can take a complex predictive model from SAS Enterprise Miner, export it in PMML format and simply make it available for real-time scoring in ADAPA for SAP HANA.  The same process, of course, applies to most commercial tools, e.g. SAP Predictive Analysis, KXEN, IBM SPSS, as well as open source tools like R and KNIME.

The unique aspect of the Zementis / SAP platform is that it combines the benefits of an open standard for predictive analytics with the power of in-memory computing.

For more product details, please see http://zementis.com/saphana.htm

Big Data Scoring with UPPI for IBM Pure Data (for Analytics and Hadoop)

In-database scoring is one of the most straightforward ways to gain insights from Big Data. It is no surprise then that the Zementis Universal PMML Plug-in (UPPI) is now being offered for a variety of database platforms. These include IBM Pure Data for Analytics (Netezza), Pivotal/Greenplum, SAP Sybase IQ, Teradata and Teradata Aster. Zementis also offers UPPI for Hadoop/Hive, including IBM Pure Data for Hadoop as well as InfoSphere BigInsights. It is in this context that we travelled to Vegas to attend the IBM Information on Demand (IOD) Conference.

I must say, I am always impressed by the IBM universe of products and tools that are being offered for analytics (descriptive and predictive) as well as Big Data in general. Zementis had a booth inside the Pure Data exhibit area and next to all the Pure Data appliances. As you can imagine, traffic was solid not just because of all the blinking lights but also because the conference itself attracts a lot of people. I believe there were 14 thousand attendants this year.

Why in-database scoring? Well, simple. Not all analytic tasks are born the same. If one is confronted with massive volumes of data that need to be scored on a regular basis, in-database scoring sounds like the logical thing to do. In all likelihood, the data in this case is already stored in a database and, with in-database scoring, there is no data movement. Data and models reside together hence scores and predictions flow on an accelerated pace.

Why scoring in Hadoop? Big Data and Hadoop are somewhat synonymous terms these days, since the latter offers an important technological platform to tackle the challenge of analyzing large volumes of data. In fact, predictive analytics is paramount for companies to extract value and insight from such data. By offering the Universal PMML Plug-in (UPPI) for Hadoop, Zementis takes a big step in making its technology available for companies around the globe to easily deploy, execute, and integrate scalable standards-based predictive analytics on a massive parallel scale through the use of Hive, a data warehouse system for Hadoop.

UPPI brings together essential technologies, offering the best combination of open standards and scalability for the application of predictive analytics. It fully supports the Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML), the de facto standard for data mining applications, which enables the integration of predictive models from IBM/SPSS, SAS, R, and many more.