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Frontline Systems, developers of the Excel Solver and a full line of advanced optimization and simulation software products for Excel, has entered the market for data mining and "predictive analytics" by acquiring all rights to XLMiner, the leading Excel-based add-in for data mining, from its prior owners and distributors, Cytel Software Inc. and Statistics.com LLC.
"Data mining and predictive analytics are very synergistic with our existing optimization and simulation software for prescriptive analytics and decision-making," said Daniel Fylstra, Frontline's President and CEO. "We've already started and will continue to integrate XLMiner's capabilities with our Risk Solver Platform, to create one integrated platform for both predictive and prescriptive analytics."
"We're very pleased with this new home for XLMiner," said Peter Bruce, President and CEO of Statistics.com LLC and co-author of the leading textbook Data Mining for Business Intelligence (Wiley, 2010). "We believe Frontline can powerfully extend XLMiner's reach, and we're supporting their efforts with our XLMiner-based data mining courses taught by expert instructors online."
XLMiner goes far beyond other statistics and forecasting add-ins for Excel. It includes multiple regression, exponential smoothing, and ARIMA models for forecasting, but it also includes data mining tools such as regression tress, k-nearest neighbors, and neural networks for more complex prediction models. It offers discriminant analysis, logistic regression, k-nearest neighbors, classification trees, naive Bayes and neural nets for classification, and association rules for affinity analysis.
Compared to enterprise data mining products, XLMiner is roughly 1/20th the cost for a single-user license, and its learning curve is far lower, making XLMiner the lowest cost and risk "entry point" for companies wishing to explore data mining. A free 30-day trial of XLMiner is available for download at www.solver.com/xlminer.
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