Salford Systems' 6^th International Applied Data Mining Conference, a user-oriented data mining and predictive analytics conference, was held in San Diego on August 23^rd through August 25^th, 2009, hosting over 100 people and offering 32 presentations across multiple tracks. Topics included what went wrong in the financial markets, best practice analytics in banking and insurance underwriting, fraud detection, discovering unexploded ordinance in minefields, various topics in healthcare and bioinformatics, predictive analytics for optimal placement of web advertisements in an ad network, genetics research, and techniques for building better models.

We were also honored to have scientific thought leaders Jerome Friedman and Richard Olshen presenting summaries of their most recent research. Jerry Friedman spoke about his Generalized PathSeeker approach to regularized regression; this technology offers high speed LASSO-style regression for extreme data set configurations with upwards of 100,000 predictors and possibly very few rows. Such data sets are commonplace in gene research and text mining and the new technology is both supremely fast and efficient. (GPS is currently available in limited release versions of Salford predictive analytics software.)

The agenda for the conference can be viewed at: http://www.salforddatamining.com/agenda.php. If you are interested in attending an online replay of the conference please contact us at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . We will be offering video recordings of the conference sometime in October.