PASS Business Analytics Marathon–June 7

The next PASS Business Analytics (BA) Marathon is coming up next month on June 7 and there is a great list of topics and speakers lined up. Register now and get the sessions on your calendars in preparation for the big event.

Register here – http://bit.ly/passbasummer2017

• Analyzing Real-Time Data Using Azure Streaming Analytics

• 07 Jun 2017 17:00 GMT – Michael Johnson

  In today’s fast-paced world, businesses require up to the minute information to support critical decisions. Traditional business intelligence solutions, however, are not able to keep up with this demand and a new approach is required. Azure Stream Analytics is a real-time event processing engine capable of analyzing millions of events every second. During this session, you will learn some of the key concepts needed to work with streaming data before stepping through an end-to-end streaming data solution.

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  Replacing Brio: Practical Advice for Analysts

• 07 Jun 2017 18:00 GMT – Julie Hyman

Brio, or Hyperion Interactive Reporting, was a staple of reporting for a long time. Following Oracle’s announcement to terminate premium support in April 2015, Brio users have been working without a safety net.

During this session Quest product manager, Julie Hyman will examine the crossroads at which many organizations find themselves as they replace Brio. She will explain the environment, common use cases and must-haves for a self-service data preparation tool for reporting. Julie will go on to share how to safely move from Brio to a more modern self-service data preparation solution to:

• Overcome challenges such as data-source proliferation, spreadsheet sprawl, manual processes and more.

• Understand the top three workflows any reporting solution must handle efficiently.

• Compare criteria for a replacement tool, such as integrating/preparing data, building queries and workflows, managing workloads and more.

Julie will give you expert advice so you can move forward confidently while reducing risks.

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  From Hours to Milliseconds: Using GPUs to Accelerate Data Discovery and Visual Analytics

• 07 Jun 2017 19:00 GMT – Todd Mostack

Technology advancements have created an explosion of human data — millions of tweets, hours of video, and patterns every day. However, analyzing and acting on this data in a timely manner is still prohibitive – until now. Born out of video game technology, GPUs are now being used to rapidly accelerate query times from hours to milliseconds for companies small and large. Todd will discuss how GPUs are disrupting the way we do data-driven business with lightning fast analytics and how business leaders can harness the tools available to them to explore and visualize data in real-time.

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  A Lazy Data Scientist’s Toolkit

• 07 Jun 2017 20:00 GMT – Mark Wilcock

The client has some burning business questions and you have the client’s data. So which tools will help you to understand that data quickly and tell your client something they did not know already? In this session, Mark will take you through his personal choices, demo each of them, explain their value and show how quickly and easily the client can start making decisions with their data. The tools are

• Tableau, a data visualisation tool, for exploring and presenting data beautifully,

• R and packages for data manipulation, plotting, text mining and predictive analytics,

• Excel – for pixel perfect reports,

• Power BI, an analytics and visualisation tool, for doing just that!,

• A SQL database in the cloud for improving data quality,

• A cloud-based machine learning toolkit (Azure ML),

• And cognitive services APIs for text analysis (and how to call them easily from R).

We’ll use a wide variety of public datasets in our examples. These include:

• The recent results of the strength of EU banks from the European Banking Authority,

• Health, wealth and populations stats from the Gapminder foundation,

• Lifespan data from the Lancet and the corporate responsibility reports from a large bank.

The examples will also use some fictional data, but based on a real project, about a trading firm’s revenue reporting and other activities.

Register here – http://bit.ly/passbasummer2017

Analyzing Healthcare Open Data with Power BI

Back in December I presented the topic Analyzing Healthcare Open Data with Power BI at the PASS BA Marathon. I want to apologize for not posting this follow up post sooner, December was just a busy month with the holidays, vacations, and after that I just kept putting this off. Well no more, here is the follow up finally. In addition to this post I have also posted the Power BI example I prepared into the Data Stories Gallery.

Here is a screenshot of the demo that I presented which was based on the World Health Organization world wide expenditure data

The presentation material and a recording of the presentation is available on the PASS web site here – Analyzing Healthcare Open Data.

Just a heads up that during the presentation I lost my Internet wifi signal but it was only for a couple of minutes and I was able to get reconnected and resume the content from where I left off.

Here is a list of some of the Healthcare Open Data sites that I shared:

• https://www.data.gov/health
• https://www.healthdata.gov
• https://www.cms.gov/
• https://www.medicare.gov/
• http://www.who.int/en/
• https://datawarehouse.hrsa.gov/
• https://open.fda.gov/

I would have liked to have spent more time on reviewing some of the sites listed above to showcase some of the data that is freely available, but with the technical difficulty I had to skip over that to allow time for the Power BI demo that I had planned and to allow time for Q&A. In the demo I showed some of the new capabilities in Power BI that were released such as the dropdown slicer option, forecasting, clustering, R visuals, Top N filtering, and a few more.

I will plan on revising the content and doing an updated version that hopefully I can present for the PASS Business Analytics Virtual Group later this year. There were a bunch of great questions asked and I am appreciative for the feedback that was provided from all of the attendees. I am glad people were able to walk away with a few nuggets of information regarding Healthcare Open Data and Power BI capabilities.

PASS Business Analytics Marathon–March 29

The next PASS Business Analytics (BA) Marathon is coming up this month on March 29 and there is a great list of topics and speakers lined up. Register now and get the sessions on your calendars in preparation for the big event.

Register here – http://bit.ly/passbaspring2017

Here is the schedule:

• Compelling Visuals in Power BI

  • 29 Mar 2017 17:00 GMT – Prathy Kamasani

  In this demo-focused session, Prathy Kamasani will be using Airbnb dataset to walk through most of built-in and custom visualisations available in Power BI Desktop.Prathy will walk through how to use and format these visualisations to create compelling visualisations.We will also look at how we can use R visualisations in Power BI with minimal knowledge of R.

• Power BI Twitter Brand Awareness Dashboard

  • 29 Mar 2017 18:00 GMT – David Moss

  Just launched a media campaign, monitoring your brand awareness and you need to understand LIVE social media insights?David Moss Power BI Solutions Architect will show you how to summarise your live social media twitter streams in a single Power BI dashboard.Visualising and monitoring live Twitter trends and comments can assist to control social insights by addressing social interaction when and where it arises, help monitor positive & negative sentiments on your Twitter feed and drill down into specific tweets to reach out to your customers to manage & control your social brand awareness. Even find engagement opportunities and discover influencers and monitor @brand mentions and #hashtags.In this session you will learn about the Azure Power BI & Cortana Intelligence Suite architecture solution required for your Social Media Power BI dashboard.An exciting technical social media marketer’s brand awareness toolset.

• Hands-On Data Analysis With Power BI Desktop

  • 29 Mar 2017 19:00 GMT – Koen Verbeeck

  There are lots of flashy Power BI demos everywhere. But most of the time, you don’t see the internal mechanics. In this demo-heavy session, we’re going to build a Power BI demo from scratch. We’ll combine data from various sources, build a simple data model and start creating data visualizations. We’ll also take a quick look at the analytical capabilities of Power BI Desktop. After this session, you’ll have a good overview of the features Power BI Desktop has to offer and you can start your own data analytics journey.

• Storytelling with Infographics

  • 29 Mar 2017 20:00 GMT – Jen Underwood

  Visual storytelling and depiction of information has existed for hundreds of years in various forms and formats. In today’s era of unprecedented data volumes, variety and velocities, infographics can help us make sense of the ocean of data. Telling an effective story through infographics requires accurate data, planning, compelling design, and visualization choices. Please join me in this fun, visual eye candy session to learn the art of storytelling with infographics.

• Three Data Preparation Essentials for Predictive Modeling

  • 29 Mar 2017 21:00 GMT – Dean Abbott

  Every predictive modeler or analytics professional knows the importance of data preparation; experts place the time expended in this stage from 50% to even 90% of the time one spends building predictive models. It is time-consuming and daunting because there are so many ways data can be wrong. Yet there are many principles that are reused in nearly every data set.This session focuses on three essential steps in data preparation, taking into consideration the data itself and how algorithms sometimes dictate the kinds of data preparation we do. The principles apply not only to predictive models, but also to data visualization and dashboards. Examples from actual modeling projects will illustrate the principles.

 

Register here – http://bit.ly/passbaspring2017

PASS Business Analytics Marathon–Dec 14

Next month is the next PASS Business Analytics (BA) Marathon on Wednesday, December 14. Six great sessions to check out! I will be kicking it off as well, so please register and join me during the event!

Stay ahead of the curve in the rapidly changing business analytics (BA) field and join us for the latest edition of the BA Marathon on December 14, 2016.

Industry experts will deliver six back-to-back webinars on R, Power BI and predictive analytics – topics that are highly relevant to today’s BA professional. Attend any of the webinars or all six!

Webinar Date: Wednesday, December 14, 2016

Start time: 17:00 GMT

Session 1: Analyzing Healthcare Open Data with Power BI
Dan English, Senior Data Warehouse Architect, Constellation

Session 2: Big Data Analytics with SparkR
Jen Underwood, Founder of Impact Analytix, LLC

Session 3: Disrupt the Static Nature of BI with Predictive Anomaly Detection
Uri Maoz, Vice President of US business, Anodot

Session 4: Using R to Clean and Transform Small Data
Mark Wilcock, Technical Delivery Manager, ‎Credit Suisse

Session 5: Visualizing Multiple Time Series with R in Power BI
Bill McLellan, BI Team Lead and Sr. BI Solutions Specialist, TKC Holdings

Session 6: Real-World Predictive Analytics
Miguel Molina-Cosculluela, Managing Partner & Analytics Evangelist, Analytikus
Diwakar Rajagopal, Senior Director of Partnerships, Pyramid Analytics

Register for any of the webinars and even if you are unable to attend the live events, we’ll notify you to access the session recordings.

Thank you to our presenting sponsor

PASS BA Webinar Marathon–Dec 10

Don’t miss out on the upcoming PASS BA Webinar Marathon coming up next week on Dec 10. There are 7 sessions to attend:)

This is to get you excited and ready for the upcoming PASS Business Analytics Conference!

And it was just announced that if you register by Dec 23 that you will be entered into a drawing for an XBox.

 

PASS BA Webinar Marathon Register Now!

 

Here are the sessions that are set for next week and I will be hosting the 2nd and 4th sessions:

Create Amazing 3D Topographic Maps In Excel With Power Query, Power Pivot, and Power Map

Chris Webb | Director, Crossjoin Consulting Limited

15:00 GMT, 07:00 PST

Tools For Exploratory Data Analysis

Mark Wilcock | Business Analytics Consultant, Zomalex Ltd.

16:00 GMT, 08:00 PST

Creating Outstanding Spreadsheet Models

Jordan Goldmeier | Dashboards and Data Visualization Expert, Cambia Factor

17:00 GMT, 09:00 PST

Implementing Data-Based Decision Making

Ginger Grant | Business Intelligence Consultant, Pragmatic Works

18:00 GMT, 10:00 PST

Modular Data Extraction and Integration Patterns

Ken Raetz | Principal, Think Data Insights, LLC

19:00 GMT, 11:00 PST

Moving From Excel to PowerBI.com, A Business Analyst’s Perspective

Matt Allington | BI Professional , Excelerator BI

20:00 GMT, 12:00 PST

Making Informed Decisions: Guidelines for Creating an Effective Dashboard

Rick Grantham | Analytics Expert, EPI-USE America / Excel.TV

21:00 GMT, 13:00 PST

PASS BA Webinar Marathon Register Now!