RapidMinerOperator Reference Manual

2014 by RapidMiner. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without prior written permission of RapidMiner.

Preface

Welcome to the RapidMiner Operator Reference, the final result of a long work-ing process. When we first started to plan this reference, we had an extensive discussion about the purpose of this book. Would anybody want to read the hole book? Starting with Ada Boost and reading the description of every single operator to the X-Validation? Or would it only serve for looking up particular operators, although that is also possible in the program interface itself?We decided for the latter and with growing progress in the making of this book, we realized how fuitile this entire discussion has been. It was not long until the book reached the 600 pages limit and now we nearly hit the 1000 pages, what is far beyond anybody would like to read entirely. Even if there would be a great structure, explaining the usage of single groups of operators as guiding transitions between the explanations of single operators, nobody could comprehend all that. The reader would have long forgotten about the Loop Clusters operator until he gets to know about cross validation. So we didnt dump any effort in that and hence the book has become a pure reference. For getting to know RapidMiner itself, this is not a suitable document. Therefore we would rather recommend to read the manual as a starting point. There are other documents available for particular scenarios, like using RapidMiner as a researcher or when you want to extend its functionality. Please take a look at our website rapidminer.com to get an overview, which documentations are available.

From that fact, we can draw some suggestions about how to read this book:

Whenever you want to know about a particular operator, just open the index

at the end of this book, and directly jump to the operator. The order of the

V

operators in this book is determined by the group structure in the operator tree,

as you will immediately see, when taking a look at the contents. As operators for

similar tasks are grouped together in RapidMiner, these operators are also near

to each other in this book. So if you are interested in broading your perspective

of RapidMiner beyond an already known operator, you can continue reading a

few pages before and after the operator you picked from the index.

Once you read the description of an operator, you can jump to the tutorial pro-

cess, that will explain a possible use case. Often the functionality of an operator

can be understood easier with a context of a complete process. All these pro-

cesses are also available in RapidMiner. You simply need to open the description

of this operator in the help view and scroll down. After pressing on the respective

link, the process will be opened and you can inspect the details, execute it and

analyse the results from break points. Apart from that, the explanation of the

parameters will give you a good insight of what the operator is capable of and

what it can be configured for.

I think theres nothing left to say except wishing you a lot of illustrative encoun-

ters with the various operators. And if you really read it from start to end, please

tell us, as we have bets running on that. Of course we will verify that by checking

if you found all the easter eggs. . .

Sebastian Land

VI

Contents

1 Process Control 1

Remember . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Recall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Multiply . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Join Paths . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Handle Exception . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Throw Exception . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

1.1 Parameter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

Set Parameters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

Optimize Parameters (Grid) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Optimize Parameters (Evolutionary) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

1.2 Loop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

Loop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

Loop Attributes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

Loop Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

Loop Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

Loop Clusters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

Loop Data Sets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

Loop and Average . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54

Loop Parameters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

Loop Files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62

X-Prediction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

1.3 Branch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

Branch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

VII

Contents

Select Subprocess . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

1.4 Collections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

Collect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

Select . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82

Loop Collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85

2 Utility 89

Subprocess . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

2.1 Macros . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93

Set Macro . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93

Set Macros . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98

Generate Macro . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102

Extract Macro . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110

2.2 Logging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118

Log . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118

Provide Macro as Log Value . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125

Log to Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128

2.3 Execution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132

Execute Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132

Execute Script . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135

Execute SQL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141

Execute Program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145

2.4 Files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148

Write as Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149

Copy File . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151

Rename File . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153

Delete File . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156

Move File . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158

Create Directory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161

2.5 Data Generation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163

Generate Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163

Generate Nominal Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165

Generate Direct Mailing Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167

Generate Sales Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169

VIII

Contents

Add Noise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171

2.6 Miscellaneous . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177

Materialize Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177

Free Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179

3 Repository Access 183

Retrieve . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183

Store . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185

4 Import 189

4.1 Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189

Read csv . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189

Read Excel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194

Read SAS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197

Read Access . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199

Read AML . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201

Read ARFF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206

Read Database . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210

Stream Database . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215

Read SPSS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219

4.2 Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222

Read Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222

4.3 Attributes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224

Read Weights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224

5 Export 227

Write . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227

5.1 Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229

Write AML . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229

Write Arff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .