RapidMiner (formerly known as: YALE, 'Yet Another Learning Environment') is one of the most popular data mining tools. In 2014, it was the most widely used data mining tool prior to the R tool, according to a survey conducted by KDnuggets. It is available for free and easy to use even if you don’t possess special programming skills. Nevertheless, it offers a large selection of operators. Startups, in particular, make the most of this tool.
RapidMiner was written in Java and contains more than 500 operators with different approaches to point out connections in data – there are options for data mining, text mining, web mining, and also for mood analysis (sentiment analysis, opinion mining), among other things. The program also imports Excel tables, SPSS files, and data sets from many databases, and integrates the WEKA and R data mining tools. This makes it a comprehensive all-rounder.
RapidMiner supports all steps of the data mining process, including the presentation of results. The tool consists of three major modules: RapidMiner Studio, RapidMiner Server, and RapidMiner Radoop, each of which executes different data mining techniques. In addition, RapidMiner prepares the data prior to analysis and optimizes it for faster subsequent processing. For each of these three modules, there’s a free and a fee-based version available.
A particular strength of RapidMiner is predictive analytics, which is the name given to predicting future developments based on collected data. When comparing data mining software, RapidMiner is one of the strongest tools out of the ones mentioned.