Neural Market Trends

I felt like a kid in a candy store tonight when I picked up the daily mail.  I got my first shipment of old German money notes in the today, the ones I won on Ebay for about $1.75.  Below is a photograph of an almost 100 year old 1000 Reichsbanknote.  It will be 100 years old on April 21st of this year.  Its in really good condition and beautifully decorated.  Even if its fake, you can't go wrong for $1.75!

(Front – note the date below the 1000)

(Reverse)

Its hard to believe but the German people, just a mere 100 years ago, probably never fathomed that their Reichsnotes would never lose value and be sold on Ebay for a fraction of its original value.

Calling all marketers!  In this video we discuss how we can use Rapidminer to create a decision tree to help us find "sweet spots" in a particular market segment.  This video tutorial uses the Rapidminer direct mail marketing data generator and a split validation operator to build the decision tree.  

Video download link (HQ): Rapidminer 5.0 Video Tutorial #6

Its hard to believe but I'm already 50% done with my first batch of Rapidminer 5.0 Video Tutorials.  So far, the reception has been positive and I thank everyone who emailed me, IM'd me, or commented on these tutorials.  I made a promise to myself to make a batch of 10 video tutorials first before I re-engineer this website further.

So far so good and I'm on target to record a new video tutorial tonight or tomorrow morning.  Video #6 will be about creating decision trees in Rapidminer  for a direct mail marketing example.  For video #7, I'll probably focus on an evolutionary weighting example, and then close out the remaining 3 tutorials with financial time series examples.

Below is an screenshot of one of the time series examples I'm working on. This is a time series chart of the S&P500 with a neural net generated trend line.  Neat, huh?

In this video we continue where we left off in Video Tutorial #4.  We discuss some of the parameters that are available in the Genetic Algorithm data transformers to select the best attributes in the data set.  We also replace the first operator with another Genetic Algorithm data transformer that allows us to manipulate population size, mutation rate, and change the selection schemes (tournament, roulette, etc).

Video download link (HQ): Rapidminer 5.0 Video Tutorial #5

When I was I kid I used to collect stamps and baseball cards, just like nearly every other American kid does. Then, about 3 years ago I started collecting US coin sets, mostly proofs from the US mint for my kids (they make great presents BTW).

As a lover of history and economics, coin/money collecting (numismatics) just made sense to me and now I go to the monthly coin show in my area and spend a few hours a week on Ebay searching for for interesting coins and paper money for my collection.  Just this week I picked up something that reminds me of runaway inflation from the past.  Its a 1923 – 20 Million Marks bank note from the Weimar Republic of Germany.   Inflation was so rampant during the Wiemar Republic that people used these notes as wall paper.  

Since I want to own a piece of history, I bought it for $1.75 from Ebay.  Goes to show you, one man's wall paper is another man's treasure.

In case you hadn't noticed, I started to tinker around with the theme of Neural Market Trends by changing it to something more simpler and removing Google Ads (as a test).  I'm doing this to help speed up my blog because a recent SEO checkup told me it was too slow, and possibly scaring off new readers.

Overall I want to make my existing and new reader experience more friendly so things may display weird or links might be temporarily broken as these changes roll out over the next few weeks.  Thanks for your patience!

I wanted to give a shout out to my high school buddy, SoldAtTheTop, for the launch of the newest version of his Data Analysis website, Blytic.  I poke around there from time to time and he's made some great changes that benefits data modelers, tinkerers, and students of economics.  He has created a rich repository of economic data that can now be easily downloaded in an Excel spreadsheet, create dazzling charts that can mash up data and display it, easy embedding of your charts into websites, and a host of other things.

I highly recommend his site and urge you check it out!  Great job SoldAtTheTop (not his real name, duh)!