INTRO TO BAYESIAN REASONING LECTURE

Here's a quick one to make the files available online from today's AI lecture at RMIT University. Much thanks to Lawrence Cavedon for making it happen.

Downloads

Lecture Notes (PDF)

Course/grade/intelligence plate model example (Netica)

Output from sneezing diagnosis class exercise (Netica)

Burgular hidden markov model example (Netica)

Same burgular HMM in Excel (Excel)

Have fun and feel free to email me once you get your bayes-nets up and running!

ACCESSING DATA WAREHOUSES WITH MDX RUNNER

It's always good to give a little something back, so each year I do some guest lecturing on data warehousing to RMIT's CS Masters students.

We usually pull a data warehouse box out of our compute cloud for the session so I can walk through the whole end-to-end stack from the hardware through to the dashboards. The session is quite useful and always well received by students.

This year the delightful Jenny Zhang and I showed the students MDX Runner, an abstraction used at VizDynamics on a daily basis to access our data warehouses. As powerful as MDX is, it has a steep learning curve and the result sets it returns can be bewildering to access programmatically. MDX Runner eases this pain by abstracting out the task of building and consuming MDX queries.

Given that it has usefulness far beyond what we do at VizDynamics, I have made arrangements for MDX Runner to be open-sourced. If you are running analysis services or any other MDX-compatible data warehousing environment, take a look at mdxrunner.org - you will certainly find it useful.

Do reach out with updates if you test it against any of the other BI platforms. Hopefully over time we can start building out a nice generalised interface into Oracle, Teradata, SAP HANA and SSAS.