SAN DIEGO—A new, free download method of Salford Systems’ data mining software has been designed and implemented, making it easier than ever for data miners to download Salford’s ultra–fast tools with just a few clicks of the mouse.

The new process works like this:

Step 1: Chose the product(s) you are interested in evaluating.
Step 2: Provide your name and contact information.
Step 3: Download!

It’s as easy as that, and Salford Systems couldn’t be happier to finally launch this new method!

Using dates in any kind of predictive modeling model can be tricky to get right. It is important to be clear about what you are trying to accomplish. Suppose, for example, we are trying to predict sales of a specific brand of beer in a given store and have daily sales data going back several years. One of the patterns we are going to want to track and capture is “seasonality,” which refers to changes in sales levels due to the season of the year. We might find that beer sales of all types are typically highest in the summer months, lowest in the winter, and intermediate in spring and fall. Of course, seasonality is only one factor among many, and good forecasts will require much more information than the date. To capture seasonality, statisticians and econometricians have long resorted to introducing variables to reflect the season of the year. This could be captured by a categorical variable coded, say, “fall” “winter” “spring” “summer.” A modeler might instead prefer to introduce a variable for the month of the year or even the week or the day of the year. The point is that this variable would be extracted from the date, and we would leverage the fact that we can observe the seasonal pattern more than once to draw conclusions about something like a “summer effect.”