We've been investing in further development of XLMiner, the easy-to-use data mining add-in for Excel that we acquired just over a year ago from Cytel Corporation and Statistics.com LLC. XLMiner has traditionally offered surprisingly powerful data mining and predictive analytics in an Excel add-in, but graphics were not its strength. We've changed that in our new release, XLMiner V4.0.
Now, XLMiner includes powerful data exploration and visualization features to support the ‘front end’ of business data analytics. To aid analysis using multiple, disparate ‘Big Data’ sources, XLMiner now works with Microsoft PowerPivot, sampling from datasets with up to hundreds of millions of rows.
Excel has traditionally included extensive tools for creating charts and graphs, but these were designed primarily for presentation, not for exploration and visualization of complex inter-relationships in multivariate data. Now in XLMiner V4.0, you can easily explore and visualize your data direcly in Excel.
Do you want to apply data mining methods to very large datasets, or multiple datasets from different sources? Yes, you CAN do this in Excel, with XLMiner V4.0 and Microsoft's PowerPivot add-in!
PowerPivot for Excel (www.powerpivot.com) is a free add-in from Microsoft’s SQL Server group that brings a powerful database engine into memory with Excel. It handles up to hundreds of millions of rows of data in Excel. What's more, PowerPivot makes it easy to integrate data from multiple disparate data sources – including Microsoft’s Window Azure Data Marketplace, with a huge array of publicly available datasets – into one, potentially quite large, in-memory relational database.
In XLMiner V4.0, we've extended XLMiner's "sample from database" facility to sample from the in-memory database maintained by PowerPivot. So you can explore, visualize, and build a data mining model for any sort of data that you can bring into Excel through PowerPivot!
Unlike XLMiner V3.x and many other Excel add-ins, XLMiner V4.0 works with new Excel 2013 Preview Edition, available as a free download for 'public beta' testing and evaluation, as a part of Office 2013 Preview, and with the RTM (Release to Manufacturing) version that will be available in early 2013. In Excel 2013, a new version of PowerPivot is included 'in the box' with Excel -- and XLMiner V4.0 works with this new version of PowerPivot, right now!