STATISTICA Text Miner

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How can I Use STATISTICA Text Miner ?

Analyze the contents of Web pages. For example, users can automatically process and summarize all Web pages of particular companies, message boards, etc.

Include unstructured notes in predictive data mining projects. For example, users may include responses to open-ended interview questions, patients' own descriptions of medical symptoms, etc. in data mining projects involving the clustering of patients and symptoms.

Analyze large document repositories. For example, users may analyze repositories of documents such as narratives of insurance claims, etc., to include such information in fraud detection projects.

STATISTICA Text Miner is an optional extension of STATISTICA Data Miner, ideal for translating unstructured text data into meaningful, valuable clusters of decision-making "gold." As most users familiar with data mining already know, real-world data comes in a variety of forms, not always organized or easily ready to analyze. STATISTICA Text Miner digs for the underlying information not readily apparent in traditional structured data.

STATISTICA Text Miner is seamlessly integrated into STATISTICA or STATISTICA Data Miner and like other StatSoft products, features the most comprehensive and powerful tools on the market, implemented with uncompromising attention to efficiency and scalability, and employing multi-threaded computing technology to extract optimum performance from advanced multiple-processor server hardware.

As all components of STATISTICA Data Miner, STATISTICA Text Miner was specifically designed as a general and open-architecture tool for mining unstructured information. The feature extraction/selection and other analytic tools available in STATISTICA Text Miner are not only applicable to text documents or Web pages, but can also be used to index, classify, cluster, or otherwise include in your analyses unstructured information such as (pre-processed) bitmaps, sound files, etc.

Core functionality of STATISTICA Text Miner:

Accessing Documents

The program contains numerous options for accessing text documents in different formats, including .txt (text), .pdf (Adobe), .ps (PostScript), .html, .xml (Web-formats), and most Microsoft Office formats (e.g., .doc, .rtf).
Flexible user interface options (and automation functions) are provided for selecting large numbers of files via wild-cards (e.g., to select all documents in a particular subdirectory structure).
The program supports full "Web-crawling" capabilities, so that documents can be extracted from the Web, starting at a particular root Web page (URL). All documents linked to that particular page will be included, as well as the documents linked to those sub-documents, and so on, up to a user-specified level or depth.
File names and URLs can also be stored in text variables, in STATISTICA data files. In this manner, the program can not only process actual text stored in text variables, but also properly interpret references to text documents or URLs. Thus, numeric information and textual information (large documents) can be stored on a per-case (observation) basis and meaningful analyses can be performed on data files where for each observation numeric as well as (voluminous) unstructured textual information is available (e.g., patients' age, height, weight, along with physicians narrative description of symptoms).
Options are provided to flexibly import such lists of filenames or URLs into the columns of a STATISTICA spreadsheet.

Processing Documents

Exclusion rules and stub-lists can be applied (to exclude common but not particularly diagnostic words like "a", "the", "to", "is" in the English language, and so on), followed by a stemming algorithm (so that English words like "traveled", "traveling" both count as instances of "travel").
STATISTICA Text Miner includes stub lists and stemming algorithms for Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and other languages (please inquire); stub lists can be edited (augmented) by the user as needed; the program is designed so that support for additional languages can be added with minimum effort.
Next, the program will index the "stubbed-and-stemmed" documents, to create a frequency count of all words and for all documents; this "raw-data" (count) information is the basis for all subsequent numerical analyses.
Before creating a STATISTICA Data File containing the counts (etc.) to summarize the documents, various additional filters may be applied; for example, the counts for particular (most frequent) words per document can be normalized (based on the length of each document), transformed (e.g., log-transformed), and optionally "compressed" by, for example, applying various feature extraction algorithms such as SVD (singular value decomposition, specifically optimized to operate on large sparse matrices).
The resulting data file with numeric information (e.g., SVD dimensions, raw counts, relative counts, most-frequent-word counts, and so on) is then ready for further analyses.
Various options are provided for writing the information extracted from text into the input data file, or directly into external databases (see also the description of STATISTICA In-Place Database Processing technology).

Analyzing Documents

Simple summary statistics may extract the most common words used in the documents.
By mapping the documents into the SVD dimensions (e.g., via PCA), dimensional maps of documents can be created, to evaluate the similarity of documents, etc.
By mapping documents into dimensions based on original (transformed) word counts, simultaneous maps of documents and words can be created, hence reflecting on the "meaning" of documents.
Clustering techniques (such as EM or k-Means) can be applied to identify clusters of similar documents.
Predictive data mining techniques can be used to relate the numerical summaries of documents to other indicators of interest, e.g., fraudulent intent, medical diagnosis, and so on.
Key analytic components requiring extensive data processing are implemented via multi-threaded computing technology, to extract optimum performance from advanced multiple-processor server hardware.

Integration with STATISTICA, STATISTICA Data Miner, and WebSTATISTICA

The text miner software is fully integrated into the STATISTICA line of software; it is not a stand-alone product manufactured by another vendor and somehow "connected" to STATISTICA! This makes this text mining solution unique in the market: By being fully integrated (and automated), the text mining functionality becomes "just-another-module", that can be integrated into the STATISTICA Data Miner workspace environment, WebSTATISTICA, or custom STATISTICA applications (via SVB; for example, users may automatically and routinely access files stored in a data warehouse, using IDP technology, to update certain analyses and numeric summaries of the textual information available in the warehouse; this could be done via WebSTATISTICA, so that the results of those analyses can be accessible to authorized users via the Web worldwide).

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