Programming is an integral part of data science. Among other things, it is considered that a mind which understands programming logic, loops, functions has higher chances of becoming a successful data scientist. So, what about people who never studied programming subject in their school or college ?
Are they doomed to have a unsuccessful career in data science ?
I’m sure there are countless people who want to enter data science domain but don’t understand coding very well. In fact, I too was a member of your non-programming league until I joined my first job. Therefore, I understand how terribly it feels when something you have never learnt haunts you at every step now.
Good news is, I found out a way! Rather, I’ve found out 19 ways using which you can ignite your appetite to learn data science without doing coding. These tools typically obviate the programming aspect and provide user-friendly GUI (Graphical User Interface) so that anyone with minimal knowledge of algorithms can simply used them to build predictive models.
Many companies (specially startups) have recently launched GUI driven data science tools. I’ve covered most of tools available in industry today. Also, I’ve added some videos to enhance your learning experience.
Note: All the information provided is gather from open-source information sources. We are just presenting some facts and not opinions. In no manner do we intent to promote/advertise any of the products/services.
RapidMiner (RM) was originally started in 2006 as an open-source stand-alone software named Rapid-I. Over the years, they have given it the name of RapidMiner and also attained ~35Mn USD in funding. The tool is open-source for old version (below v6) but the latest versions come in a 14-day trial period and licensed after that.
RM covers the entire life-cycle of prediction modeling, starting from data preparation to model building and finally validation and deployment. The GUI is based on a block-diagram approach, something very similar to Matlab Simulink. There are predefined blocks which act as plug and play devices. You just have to connect them in the right manner and a large variety of algorithms can be run without a single line of code. On top of this, they allow custom R and Python scripts to be integrated into the system.
There current product offerings include the following:
RM is currently being used in various industries including automotive, banking, insurance, life Sciences, manufacturing, oil and gas, retail, telecommunication and utilities.
DataRobot (DR) is a highly automated machine learning platform built by all time best Kagglers including Jeremy Achin, Thoman DeGodoy and Owen Zhang. Their platform claims to have obviated the need for data scientists. This is evident from a phrase from their website – “Data science requires math and stats aptitude, programming skills, and business knowledge. With DataRobot, you bring the business knowledge and data, and our cutting-edge automation takes care of the rest.”
DR proclaims to have the following benefits:
With funding of ~60Mn USD and more than 100 employees, DR looks in good shape for the future.
BigML is another platform with ~Mn USD in funding. It provides a good GUI which takes the user through 6 steps as following:
These processes will obviously iterate in different orders. The BigML platform provides nice visualization of results and has algorithms for solving classification, regression, clustering, anomaly detection and association discovery problems. You can get a feel of how their interface works using their YouTube channel.
The Google Cloud Prediction API offers RESTful APIs for building machine learning models for android applications. This platform is specifically for mobile applications based on Android OS. Some of the use cases include:
Though the API can be used by any system, there are also specific Google API client libraries build for better performance and security. These exist for various programming languages- Python, Go, Java, JavaScript, .net, NodeJS, Obj-C, PHP and Ruby.
Paxata is one of the few organizations which focus on data cleaning and preparation, NOT the machine learning or statistical modeling part. It is an MS Excel-like application that is easy to use, with visual guidance making it easy to bring together data, find and fix dirty or missing data, and share and re-use data projects across teams. Like others mentioned here, Paxata eliminates coding or scripting, so overcoming technical technical barriers involved in handling data.
Paxata platform follows the following process:
With a funding of ~25Mn USD, Praxata has set its foot in financial services, consumer goods and networking domains. It might be a good tool to use if your work requires extensive data cleaning.
Trifacta is another startup focussed on data preparation. It has 2 product offering:
Trifacta offers a very intuitive GUI for performing data cleaning. It takes data as input and provides a summary with various statistics by column. Also, for each column it automatically recommends some transformations which can be selected using a single click. Various transformations can be performed on the data using some pre-defined functions which can be called easily in the interface.
Trifacta platform uses the following steps of data preparation:
With ~75Mn USD in funding, Trifacta is currently being used in financial, life sciences and telecommunication industry.
Narrative Science is based on a unique idea in the sense that it generates automated reports using data. It works like a data story-telling tool which used advanced natural language processing to create reports. It is something similar to a consulting report.
Some of the features of this platform include:
With ~30Mn USD in funding, Narrative Science is currently being used in financial, insurance, government and e-commerce domains. Some of its customers include American Century Investments, PayScale, MasterCard, Forbes, Deloitte, etc.
Having discussed some startups in this domain, lets move on to some of the academic initiatives which are trying to automate some aspects of data science. These have potential of turning into successful enterprise in future.
MLBase is an open-source project developed by AMP (Algorithms Machines People) Lab at University of California, Berkeley. The core idea is to provide an easy solution for applying machine learning to large scale problems.
It has 3 offerings:
This undertaking is still under active development and we should hear about the developments in the near future.
Weka is a data mining software written in Java, developed at the Machine Learning Group at University of Waikato, New Zealand. It is a GUI based tool which is very good for beginners in data science and the best part is that it is open-souce. You can learn about it using the MOOC offered by University of Waikato here. You can learn more about it in this article.
Though weka is currently more used in the academic community, but it might be the stepping stone of something big coming up in future.
Automatic Statistician is not a product per se but a research organization which is creating a data exploration and analysis tool. It can take in various kinds of data and use natural language processing to generate a detailed report. It is being developed by researchers who have worked in Cambridge and MIT and also won Google’s Focussed Research Award with a price of $750,000. Though is it still under development and very minimal information is available about the project, it looks like it is being backed by Google. You can find some information here.
I have discussed a selected set of 10 examples above but there are many more like these. I’ll briefly name a few of them here and you can explore further if this isn’t enough to whet your appetite:
If you’re hearing these names for the first time, you’ll be surprised (like I was :D) that so many tools exist. But the good thing is that they haven’t had a disruptive impact as of now. But the real question is will these technologies achieve their goals? Only time can tell!