Software

Resampling Stats, Inc. announced the release of XLMiner, a comprehensive data mining add-in for Excel developed by Cytel Software Corp. and distributed by Resampling Stats, Inc.

XLMiner is a fully integrated add-in to Microsoft Excel. Topics and methods available in this tool include classification (classification trees, discriminant analysis, logistic regression, neural networks, naive Bayes, k-nearest neighbors), prediction (multiple linear regression with subset selection, k-nearest neighbors, regression trees), affinity analysis (association rules), data reduction and exploration (principal components, k-means clustering, hierarchical clustering), and data preparation (partitioning into training, validation and test data sets, stratified sampling for rare outcomes, missing data imputation, binning, transformation of categorical variables into dummies or category scores). XLMiner also extends Excel's graphics with matrix scatter plots, dendrograms, box plots, and lift charts. Because XLMiner is Excel-based, it has a short learning curve for those familiar with Excel. It can also integrate easily with other Excel-based analysis the user may already be doing. A lengthy review of XLMiner (along with comparisons to SAS Enterprise Miner, SPSS Clementine, GhostMiner, and Quadstone) appeared in the November, 2003, issue of The American Statistician.

XLMiner uses Excel primarily as an interface and platform - XLMiner's data mining modules [aps1]were developed by Cytel Software Corp., maker of the leading tools for exact statistical analysis (www.cytel.com). These modules do not depend on Excel's statistical calculations. While Excel limits the user to 60,000 rows, XLMiner allows the user to sample from a much larger database, do the analysis on a statistically-valid sample, and, for supervised learning, score the results back out to the database.

XLMiner's education version was released in 2002 and is in use at MIT's Sloan School, Duke's Fuqua School, Georgetown's McDonough School, the University of Maryland's Smith School, Indiana University, Boston University, and elsewhere.

XLMiner is licensed commercially for 2 years ($899) and academically for 1 year ($199, $49 student). Limited version download available at www.xlminer.com.

Contact: Peter Bruce (pbruce@xlminer.com or stats@resample.com)
Resampling Stats, Inc.
612 N. Jackson St., Arlington, VA USA 22201
phone: 703-522-2713 fax: 703-522-5846
Web: www.resample.com