Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) are the state of the art for sequence analysis ^{5 6}. With the release of KNIME Analytics Platform 3.6, KNIME extended its set of deep learning integrations, adding the Keras integration to the DL4J Integration. This adds considerably more flexibility and advanced layers, like RNN Layers.

In this article, we want to find out what Recurrent Neural Networks are in general, and LSTMs in particular. Let’s see where they are useful and how to set up and use the Keras integration in KNIME Analytics Platform to implement them.

As a use case for this particular application of RNNs and LSTMs we want to focus on automatic text generation. The question is: Can we teach KNIME to write a fairy tale?

Ever sat next to a friend or colleague at the computer and were awed when you suddenly realised the way they do certain tasks is much better? We recently asked KNIME users to share their tips and tricks on using KNIME. In this series of posts we’ll be showing you how the experts use KNIME in the hopes that by sharing ideas you’ll discover some handy techniques.

Viewing Content in the Workflow Editor

By Stephen Roughley

You can visualize two workflows (or metanode content) side by side inside the Workflow Editor of KNIME Analytics Platform.

To return the view to show only one editor, drag the additional editor tab to the tab panel in the main editor. Drop when you see a gray line appearing in the tab panel in the main editor.

Author: Paolo Tamagnini

The first step in data science is always data exploration, where we try to understand single attributes and their relationships with each other. Such exploratory analysis can be of two kinds: univariate and multivariate. We will limit the multivariate exploration here to bivariate exploration.

The univariate case considers data columns individually, while the bivariate case takes into account one pair of columns at a time.

Authors: Jeany Prinz & Oleg Yasnev

Today we will have a blast by travelling ∼270,000 years back in time. And we won’t even need a DeLorean, just our trusty KNIME Analytics Platform. We will return to the Ice Age and examine genetic material retrieved from a cave. We will solve the mystery as to which species the DNA came from.

To investigate this ancient DNA, we will utilize one of the most widely used bioinformatics applications: BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool). We will do that by running the BLAST RESTful interfaces to submit BLAST searches inside of KNIME Analytics Platform. This post speaks directly to people interested in bioinformatics. At the same time, because it covers the technical aspect of handling asynchronous REST operations, it will also be useful for those in other fields. Thus, if you have an interesting web application you want to use within KNIME - especially one where the resource method execution takes longer - keep reading!

Author: Srinivas Attili, Director – Marketing Analytics & Data Science at Juniper Networks

Often, organizations adopt tools and systems as per the emerging technology trends and their organic needs. This leads to a situation where a company’s technology landscape often resembles a forest of tools crowded in one place, however each tool is different from the next.

Information created by these diverse tools is often known only to a small group of people within the company and remains isolated from such pools created by various other systems. These unconnected islands of information need to be brought together, synthesized to derive insights that would not have been realized with the siloes of data.

Authors: Marten Pfannenschmidt and Paolo Tamagnini

There are two main analytics streams when it comes to social media: the topic and tone of the conversations and the network of connections. You can learn a lot about a user from their connection network!

Let’s take Twitter for example. The number of followers is often assumed to be an index of popularity. Furthermore, the number of retweets quantifies the popularity of a topic. The number of crossed retweets between two connections indicates the livelihood and strength of the connection. And there are many more such metrics.

@KNIME on Twitter counts more than 4500 followers (as of October 2018): the social niche of the KNIME real-life community. How many of them are expert KNIME users, how many are data scientists, how many are attentive followers of posted content?

Let’s check the top 20 active followers of @KNIME on Twitter and let’s arrange them on a chord diagram (Fig. 1).

Are you one of them?

Author: Peter Ohl

We are often asked two things about data privacy in KNIME:

• How are data handled in the open source KNIME Analytics Platform?
• Who has access to the data that are processed?

Before diving into the details, let’s first put this into context:

KNIME Analytics Platform is open source and has a huge community contributing to its functionality by developing many Community Extensions.

In this blog series we’ll be experimenting with the most interesting blends of data and tools. Whether it’s mixing traditional sources with modern data lakes, open-source devops on the cloud with protected internal legacy tools, SQL with noSQL, web-wisdom-of-the-crowd with in-house handwritten notes, or IoT sensor data with idle chatting, we’re curious to find out: will they blend? Want to find out what happens when IBM Watson meets Google News, Hadoop Hive meets Excel, R meets Python, or MS Word meets MongoDB?

Follow us here and send us your ideas for the next data blending challenge you’d like to see at willtheyblend@knime.com.

Today: KNIME Meets KNIME - Will They Blend?

Author: Phil Winters

The Challenge

Imagine you have been happily getting and using a new version of KNIME Analytics Platform with all of its additional features and functionality twice a year for many, many years.

But one day, you are required by your organization to pull out something from your distant KNIME past – something that at the time was very, very important and that needs to work EXACTLY the same way today.

But you’ve heard all the horror stories of other data science tools and platforms that have changed so fundamentally between versions (sometimes yearly) that a time-consuming migration (or even a rewrite) is required to get the old code to work. And of course, there is no guarantee from these vendors of backward compatibility nor that the results will be the same even when you do get it to work again. But what about KNIME? Will the old easily blend with the new? That is our challenge today!

Authors: Maarit Widmann and Moritz Heine

Ever been skewed by the presence of outliers in your set of data? Anomalies, or outliers, can be a serious issue when training machine learning algorithms or applying statistical techniques. They are often the result of errors in measurements or exceptional system conditions and therefore do not describe the common functioning of the underlying system. Indeed, the best practice is to implement an outlier removal phase before proceeding with further analysis.

But hold on there! In some cases, outliers can give us information about localized anomalies in the whole system; so the detection of outliers is a valuable process because of the additional information they can provide about your dataset.

There are many techniques to detect and optionally remove outliers from a dataset. In this blog post, we show an implementation in KNIME Analytics Platform of four of the most frequently used - traditional and novel - techniques for outlier detection.

Author: Daria Goldmann

About a year ago we told a beautiful story about how KNIME Analytics Platform can be used to automate an established modeling process using the KNIME Model Factory. Recently our Life Science team faced an exhausting and frightening exercise of building, validating, and scoring models for more than 1500 data sets.