RapidMiner is a very popular data mining tool. It is (one of) the most used by the data miners according to the annual Kdnuggets polls (2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007). There are two versions. We describe here the Community Edition which freely downloadable from the editor's website.
The new RapidMiner 5.0 has a new graphical user interface which is very similar to that of Knime. The organization of the workspace is the same. The sequence of data processing (using operators) is described with a diagram called "process" into the RapidMiner documentation. In fact, this version 5.0 joined the presentation adopted by the vast majority of data mining software. Some features are shared with many tools, among others: the connection to the R software; the meta-nodes which implements a loop or a standard succession of operations; the description of the methods underlying operators which is continuously in the right part of the main window.
RapidMiner 5.0 having evolved substantially (compared with previous versions e.g. the version 4.6 described in one of our tutorials). I thought it was appropriate to study this in detail, evaluating its behavior in the context of a standard data mining analysis. We want to implement the following process: (1) creating a decision tree from a labeled dataset; (2) exporting the model (the classification tree) into a external file (PMML format) in order to a deployment thereafter; (3) assessing the model performance using a cross-validation resampling scheme; (4) applying the model on a set of unlabeled instances, the results, i.e. the values of the descriptors and the assigned class, must be exported into a CSV file. These are standard data mining tasks. We have described them in many tutorials. We want to check if it is easy to implement them with this new version of RapidMiner. Indeed, with the previous version, defining some sequences of operations was complicated. Implementing a cross-validation for instance was not really intuitive.
Keywords: rapidminer, knime, cross-validation, decision tree, classification tree, deployment
Tutorial: en_Tanagra_RapidMiner_5.pdf
Dataset: adult_rapidminer.zip
References:
Rapid-I, "RapidMiner"
Knime, "Knime Desktop"
