Orange Blog
By: THOCEVAR, Dec 23, 2017
Speeding Up Network Visualization
The Orange3 Network add-on contains a convenient Network Explorer widget for network visualization. Orange uses an iterative force-directed method (a variation of the Fruchterman-Reingold Algorithm) to layout the nodes on the 2D plane. The goal of force-directed methods is to draw connected nodes close to each other as if the edges that connect the nodes were acting as springs. We also don’t want all nodes crowded in a single point, but would rather have them spaced evenly.
By: AJDA, Nov 29, 2017
How to Properly Test Models
On Monday we finished the second part of the workshop for the Statistical Office of Republic of Slovenia. The crowd was tough - these guys knew their numbers and asked many challenging questions. And we loved it! One thing we discussed was how to properly test your model. Ok, we know never to test on the same data you’ve built your model with, but even training and testing on separate data is sometimes not enough.
By: AJDA, Nov 17, 2017
Data Mining for Business and Public Administration
We’ve been having a blast with recent Orange workshops. While Blaž was getting tanned in India, Anže and I went to the charming Liverpool to hold a session for business school professors on how to teach business with Orange. Related: Orange in Kolkata, India Obviously, when we say teach business, we mean how to do data mining for business, say predict churn or employee attrition, segment customers, find which items to recommend in an online store and track brand sentiment with text analysis.
By: BLAZ, Nov 8, 2017
Orange in Kolkata, India
We have just completed the hands-on course on data science at one the most famous Indian educational institutions, Indian Statistical Institute. A one week course was invited by Institute’s director Prof. Dr. Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay, and financially supported by the founding of India’s Global Initiative of Academic Networks. Indian Statistical Institute lies in the hearth of old Kolkata. A peaceful oasis of picturesque campus with mango orchards and waterlily lakes was founded by Prof.
By: AJDA, Nov 3, 2017
Neural Network is Back!
We know you’ve missed it. We’ve been getting many requests to bring back Neural Network widget, but we also had many reservations about it. Neural networks are powerful and great, but to do them right is not straight-forward. And to do them right in the context of a GUI-based visual programming tool like Orange is a twisted double helix of a roller coaster. Do we make each layer a widget and then stack them?
By: AJDA, Oct 26, 2017
Analyzing Surveys
Our streak of workshops continues. This time we taught professionals from public administration how they can leverage data analytics and machine learning to retrieve interesting information from surveys. Thanks to the Ministry of Public Administration, this is only the first in a line of workshops on data science we are preparing for public sector employees. For this purpose, we have designed EnKlik Anketa widget, which you can find in Prototypes add-on.
By: ASTARIC, Oct 13, 2017
Diving Into Car Registration Data
Last week, we presented Orange at the Festival of Open Data, a mini-conference organized by the Slovenian government, dedicated to the promotion of transparent access to government data. In a 10 minute presentation, we showed how Orange can be used to visualize and explore what kinds of vehicles were registered for the first time in Slovenia in 2017. The original dataset is available at the OPSI portal and it consists of 73 files, one for each month since January 2012.
By: AJDA, Sep 22, 2017
Understanding Voting Patterns at AKOS Workshop
Two days ago we held another Introduction to Data Mining workshop at our faculty. This time the target audience was a group of public sector professionals and our challenge was finding the right data set to explain key data mining concepts. Iris is fun, but not everyone is a biologist, right? Fortunately, we found this really nice data set with ballot counts from the Slovenian National Assembly (thanks to Parlameter).
By: BLAZ, Sep 15, 2017
Orange at Station Houston
With over 262 member companies, Station Houston is the largest hub for tech startups in Houston. One of its members is also Genialis, a life science data exploration company that emerged from our lab and is now delivering pipelines and user-friendly apps for analytics in systems biology. Thanks to the invitation by the director of operations Alex de la Fuente, we gave a seminar on Data Science for Everyone. We spoke about how Orange can support anyone to learn about data science and then use machine learning on their own data.
By: AJDA, Aug 28, 2017
Can We Download Orange Faster?
One day Blaž and Janez came to us and started complaining how slow Orange download is in the US. Since they hold a large course at Baylor College of Medicine every year, this causes some frustration. Related: Introduction to Data Mining Course in Houston But we have the data and we’ve promptly tried to confirm their complaints by analyzing them… well, in Orange! First, let us observe the data. We have 4887 recorded download sessions with one meta feature reporting on the country of the download and four features with time, size, speed in bytes and speed in gigabytes of the download.