RapidMiner

Like KNIME, RapidMiner works through visual programming and is capable of processing, analyzing, and modeling data. With its open-source data preparation, machine learning, and model deployment platform, RapidMiner gives Data Science teams more leeway to act. A single data platform accelerates the construction of complete analytical workflows-from data preparation and machine learning to model validation and deployment-in a single environment, greatly improving efficiency and reducing the time spent on Data Science projects.

There are many companies in need of analytics systems, but the high cost and excessive complexity of this software in most cases forces them to abandon the idea of building their own analytics system in favor of the well-known Excel. Also, the additional costs of employee training, maintenance of expensive data storage systems, etc. Open Source solutions can help you here – there are not so many of them, but there is a very good software, RapidMiner is one of them. RapidMiner (hereinafter simply “miner”) – a tool created for data mining, with the basic idea that the miner (analyst) does not have to program when doing his job. At the same time, as you know, mining requires data, so it was equipped with a good enough set of operators solving a wide range of tasks of receiving and processing information from various sources (databases, files, etc.), and we can say with confidence, that it is also a complete tool for ETL.

Besides the miner itself there is a RapidMiner Server (formerly called RapidAnalytics, before version 6), which can be used as a repository for storing and executing the miner processes (including scheduled ones), “sneaking” connections to data sources between users, giving data from the miner processes as a web service.

Unfortunately for us, from the 6th version the creators of the miner decided to start making money on the sales of this software and changed the license from AGPL to Business Source. Nevertheless the 5th version is AGPL and we can use it freely and without limitation. That’s why we will consider it in this article. Also note that version 6 doesn’t have a lot of new operators and features (perhaps the most interesting is cloud support), and for most tasks RapidMiner 5 Community will be enough.