RapidMiner Studio
RapidMiner is a predictive analytics and machine learning platform originally developed at the faculty for artificial intelligence at the Technische Universität Dortmund, Germany. Since 2007, RapidMiner Inc. has taken charge of further development of the software. The vendor provides the source code of the tool under the AGPL open source license and has made a limited version of the tool available as an open source version in the past.
RapidMiner has undergone a shift in strategy, limiting the capabilities of the open source version in recent years. The commercial version offers extended access to different common databases, processing of unlimited rows of data, as well as professional technical support. Due to its large user base and its continued investment in the usability and productivity of the tool, RapidMiner seems to be managing this transition well.
Current investment is being directed at enhancing the user interface, upgrades to the community website, further extension of the RapidMiner Marketplace and integration with Hadoop, Spark, TensorFlow and H2O. RapidMiner functionality can be extended with additional plugins, which are made available via the RapidMiner Marketplace. The RapidMiner Extensions Marketplace provides a platform for developers to create data analysis algorithms and publish them to the user community. The RapidMiner portfolio also offers functionality for web-based reports and the code-free creation of interactive web apps. The tool also offers possibilities to integrate with business intelligence software tools including Qlik, Tableau and Jaspersoft. Recently RapidMiner has added functionality for business-user-friendly data preparation and automated machine learning.
RapidMiner targets data scientists and advanced business analysts, and has a strong focus on machine learning methods for classification and clustering algorithms. In order to support novices in advanced analytics, RapidMiner includes an integrated recommendation feature (“Wisdom of Crowds”). Wisdom of Crowds is an innovative feature that guides users by proposing what most RapidMiner users would do as the next step in a specific analysis.
User & Use Cases
Most customers use RapidMiner for visual analysis/data exploration (67 percent) and data preprocessing (56 percent). 38 percent use it for advanced analytics and 23 percent for operationalization. RapidMiner’s focus is on enabling machine learning, illustrated by the fact that 75 percent of users are data preparation, data discovery and advanced analytics users. However, data preparation and exploration consumes most of the time in analytics projects and many projects have not yet reached the stage of analytic modelling and operationalization. RapidMiner is mostly deployed in smaller and medium-sized companies, which is reflected in a rather low mean and median number of users per installment. In competitive evaluations RapidMiner is evaluated alongside other advanced analytics software products such as KNIME, SPSS Statistics and Modeller, and Azure ML.
Current vs. planned use
N=18
5 products most often evaluated in competition with RapidMiner
N=20
Total number of users per company
N=21
Advanced analytics users per company
N=21
Advanced analytics users (as a percentage of all users)
N=21
Company size (number of employees)
N=21
