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.

With the launch of our new web site in September 2009, we were also pleased to launch our new blog. Here you can benefit from the accumulated experience of the Salford analytics team, reflecting what we have learned over the past 20 years of consulting and predictive analytics software development.

The Salford Predictive Analytics, Data Mining and Business Intelligence NewsLetter/Blog contains company news, analytics advice, real world examples using our technology, tech support topics, technical discussions and summaries of interesting papers (especially those presented at our user conferences). In addition, we will provide information of interest to followers of CART®, MARS®, TreeNet®, PRIM™, RandomForests® PATHSEEKER™ and other new technology we are in the process of developing.

We will be focused on practical matters and hope to help predictive analysts, data miners and decision makers in day-to-day tasks. We will occasionally include editorial material reflecting our views on current developments in the market and the practice of data mining.

If you want an email reminder, sign up here.

SAN DIEGO – Data mining technology allows sports teams to find new indicators to measure player performance while helping them gain insight into athletes’ future success, asserted Mikhail Golovnya, Salford Systems’ senior scientist, during his presentation at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston last week.

SAN DIEGO - Dr. Falk Huettmann, a wildlife ecologist and professor at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, has written a report entitled Future of Alaska in which he forecasts how climate change, human activities, natural disasters and cataclysmic events might affect Alaska’s ecosystem over the next 100 years.

SAN DIEGO – Salford Systems CEO Dan Steinberg and Salford product user Felipe Fernandez will share with KDD 2011 attendees how broad scale predictive modeling and marketing optimization can be used to improve retail sales. The presentation will be included in the conference’s inaugural Industrial Practice Expo on Tuesday, Aug. 23.