Data mining, data warehousing, decision support and knowledge discovery make up the universe of DSstar, the only executive business newsletter supporting strategic employment of these technologies.

The On-Line Executive Journal for Data-Intensive Decision Support
*** Oct 26, 1999: Vol. 3, No. 43 ***
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IN THIS ISSUE:

MAKING PROFITABLE USE OF CONFIDENCE INTERVALS
UNDERSTANDING EXPEDIENT KNOWLEDGE INVENTORY
SMART BOT ENHANCES INVESTMENT PORTFOLIOS

ANALYSIS & COMMENTARY

THE USE OF CONFIDENCE INTERVALS TO GO BEYOND SAMPLED DATA
By Ed Colet

Executive Editor-at-Large Inderpal Bhandari presents a guest editorial by Virtual Gold's Acting Director of Research:

A data mining analysis is much more open ended than a conventional statistical test. Rather than starting with a hypothesis, one starts with data, and eventually arrives at a conclusion. Along the way, there may be multiple hypotheses that are entertained, but too many to test in a conventional manner. Data that are mined may have initially been collected for reasons that have nothing to do with data mining, but the data happen to be relevant and available. So when one discovers interesting and surprising patterns as a result of data mining, the real questions to ask are: (a) does this pattern hold beyond this data set, and beyond this sample? and (b) what's the true picture of what might be going on if I were to extrapolate beyond the data that are sampled? In this column, I outline the use of Confidence Intervals as a useful tool for answering these type of questions.

EXPEDIENT KNOWLEDGE INVENTORY EXPLAINED

Expedient Knowledge Inventory, or EKI, is defined as a "methodology for the identification, classification, and enhancement of business knowledge and processes." Expedient Knowledge Inventory can help your warehousing, with the right tools. DSstar gives an elementary overview of the features and workings of EKI.

EXTERPRISE INC. INTRODUCES NEW SOFTWARE CATEGORY, EMARKET MANAGEMENT (eMM)

Exterprise Inc. has unveiled its strategy to pioneer a family of software and services for an emerging category, e-Market Management (eMM), that transforms the way businesses go to market. The company also announced ActiveBusiness 2.0, the first eMM software platform built on next generation collaborative intelligent agents architecture.

MOBIUS`S VIEWDIRECT TECHNOLOGY SELECTED BY THE STATE OF MONTANA TO MANAGE REPORT OUTPUT FROM PEOPLESOFT ERP SYSTEM

Mobius Management Systems, Inc. announced that the State of Montana has chosen Mobius' ViewDirect technology for an enterprise-wide implementation to view and analyze report data from the State's PeopleSoft Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. The customized information extracted using the Mobius software will reach more than 2,000 users throughout the State.

ARTIFICIAL LIFE RELEASES NEW SMART-BOT PRODUCT

ALife-PortfolioManager uses ALife-SmartEngine Technology and state of the art financial models to enable the user to manage and optimize personalized investment portfolios, gather and filter portfolio relevant news, maintain individualized investment profiles, and communicate with users in natural language through a customizable, human-like interface.

LUMINA INTRODUCES ANALYTICA DECISION ENGINE 2.0 DEVELOPMENT TOOL

Lumina Decision Systems, a developer of visual software for creating, analyzing, and communicating quantitative business models, has introduced a new development tool which will facilitate the incorporation of modeling and probabilistic analysis capabilities into custom applications and Web sites.

ACTION ITEMS

Acta Expands Data Warehousing Solutions For Extracting ERP Data To 64-Bit Operating Environment
Acta Technology, Inc. announced at the GartnerGroup's Symposium/ITxpo 99 conference that its award-winning data warehousing solutions will now be available on Solaris 7, a 64-bit operating environment by Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Ardent Software And NEON Systems Partner
This partnership complements Ardent's DataStage Suite by providing customers with direct access to DB2 for OS/390-MVS through NEON's Shadow Direct middleware. Shadow Direct provides direct access to mainframe-based data from client/server and n-tier environments such as UNIX and Windows NT.

Thazar Solutions Incorporates IBM Software In Business Intelligence Solution For Property And Casualty Insurance
Thazar Business Intelligence Suite is a combination of data warehousing and decision support software and services that offers a data analysis and reporting solution for the insurance industry.

MicroStrategy Becomes First IBM Business Intelligence Partner To Earn Validation And Registration In Netfinity ClusterProven Program
MicroStrategy Incorporated, a leading worldwide provider of Intelligent E-Business software, has become IBM's first business intelligence partner to receive ClusterProven validation and registration on the Netfinity platform. As a member of ClusterProven, MicroStrategy will be able to integrate Netfinity's clustering strategies into its intelligence solutions.

Canstock.com And DayTradeAlerts.com Partner With Strategy.com 10.26.99
Strategy.com, announced that Canstock and DayTradeAlerts.com have joined the Strategy.com Network. Strategy.com will deliver personalized information to Canstock's and DayTradeAlerts.com's customers via a variety of electronic channels.

Sybase Announces General Availability Of Openswitch To Provide Continuous Availability For The Portal-Ready Environment
A scalable solution, OpenSwitch 12.0 provides load balancing and re-routing of client connections to multiple servers, while offering users a central point of management for application configuration.

Sybase And Nettech Systems Team To Enable Wireless Synchronization Of E-Business Data
Sybase, Inc. and Nettech Systems Inc. announced that they are working together to enable the wireless synchronization of e-Business data from mobile devices, including laptops and handhelds, to a variety of corporate information sources.

Sybase.Startup.Com Focuses On Rapid Delivery Of E-Business Solutions For The Startup Market 10.26.99
Sybase, Inc. announced its plans to deliver Sybase.Startup.Com, a new program that delivers e-business solutions and services customized for the "dot.com" marketplace. Combining the company's flagship enterprise database, Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE), with Sybase's award-winning Enterprise Application Server (EAServer) and Professional Services, Sybase.Startup.Com provides everything required to build a mission-critical Internet back-end that can be up and running within 24 hours.

Prime Response And Data Distilleries Partner To Create Powerful Marketing Solution
At the Prime Response International User Conference. Prime Response introduced a strategic partnership with Data Distilleries. Its clients include several of the largest Dutch banks and insurance companies. Data Distilleries' Customer Care Suite will be integrated with Prime Vantage, offering customers a way to reduce mail volumes and increase response rates through more targeted mailings.

SAS Institute Announces Availability Of Its Intelligent Warehousing Solution For Baan
At the Baan World Users Fall Workshop, SAS Institute Inc. has announced the early production availability of its Intelligent Warehousing Solution for Baan. The solution reportedly reduces both cost and time of data delivery.

NCR Pairs Up With French Retail Chain
NCR Corporation has announced that Casino Group, a leading French retail chain, is expanding the capacity of its data warehouse, which is built on the foundation of NCR's Teradata Warehouse, in order to implement a customer relationship management solution.

Visual Numerics Targets Business Intelligence Market With JWAVE 10.26.99
Visual Numerics seeks to change the decision support paradigm; tabular OLAP data can now be analyzed using JWAVE's component-based analytical and visualization techniques.

Marketing Analytics Of Net.Analysis Tie Together E-Customer Relationship Management For Earthweb, Egreetings, And When.Com 10.26.99
Net.Genesis Corporation has declared that three Internet companies-- EarthWeb, When.com, and Egreetings--are attempting to enhance e-business sales and marketing through net.Genesis' net.Analysis solution.

Information Discovery Becomes The First ASP For Pattern Analysis 10.26.99
The Patterns at Your Service ASP model allows corporations to provide their business users with fast, consistent knowledge on demand with minimal start-up effort, giving them the advantage to succeed in rapidly changing markets.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"Businesses are going beyond traditional business-to-business and business-to-consumer models to create new value networks with customers and business partners."

CONFERENCES & SEMINARS

DSstar INFORMATION

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All comments regarding editorial content should be sent to: dseditor@dsstar.com

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