Orange Blog
By: BLAZ, Feb 12, 2015
Towards Orange 3
We are rushing, full speed ahead, towards Orange 3. A complete revamp of Orange in Python 3 changes its data model to that of numpy, making Orange compatible with an array of Python-based data analytics. We are rewriting all the widgets for visual programming as well. We have two open fronts: the scripting part, and the widget part. So much to do, but it is going well: the closed tasks for widgets are those on the left of Anze (the board full of sticky notes), and those open, in minority, are on Anze’s right.
By: BLAZ, Jan 18, 2015
Loading your data
By a popular demand, we have just published a tutorial on how to load the data table into Orange. Besides its own .tab format, Orange can load any tab or comma delimited data set. The details are though in writing header rows that tell Orange about the type and domain of each attribute. The tutorial is a step-by-step description on how to do this and how to transfer the data from popular spreadsheet programs like Excel.
By: BLAZ, Oct 24, 2014
Hands-on Orange at Functional Genomics Workshop
Last week we have co-organized a Functional Genomics Workshop. At University of Ljubljana we have hosted an inspiring pack of scientists from the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research from Toronto. Part of the event was a hands-on workshop Data mining without programing, where we have used Orange to analyze data from systems biology. Data included a subset of Charlie Boone’s famous yeast interaction data and data from chemical genomics.
By: BIOLAB, Aug 26, 2014
Orange Canvas applied to x-ray optics
Orange Canvas is being appropriated by guys who would like to use it as graphical environment for simulating x-ray optics. Manuel Sanchez del Rio, from The European Synchrotron Facility in Grenoble, France, and Luca Rebuffi from Elettra-Sincrotrone, Trieste, Italy, were looking for a tool that would help them integrate the various tools for x-ray optics simulations, like the popular SHADOW and SRW. They discovered that the data workflow paradigm, like the one used in Orange Canvas, fits their needs perfectly.
By: BIOLAB, May 29, 2014
Orange and SQL
Orange 3.0 will also support working with data stored in a database. While we have already talked about this some time ago, we here describe some technical details for anybody interested. This is not a thorough tecnical report, its purpose is only to provide an impression about the architecture of the upcoming version of Orange. So, data tables in Orange 3.0 can refer to data in the working memory or in the database.
By: BIOLAB, May 26, 2014
Workshops at Baylor College of Medicine
On May 22nd and May 23rd, we (Blaz Zupan and Janez Demsar, assisted by Marinka Zitnik and Balaji Santhanam) have given two hands-on workshops called Data Mining without Programming at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. Actually, there was a lot of programming, but no Python or alike. The workshop was designed for biomedical students and Baylor’s faculty members. We have presented a visual programming approach for development of data mining workflows for interactive data exploration.
By: BIOLAB, Apr 29, 2014
Viewing Images
I am lately having fun with Image Viewer. The widget has been recently updated and can display images stored locally or on the internet. But wait, what images? How on earth can Orange now display images if it can handle mere tabular or basket-based data? Here’s an example. I have considered a subset of animals from the [download id=“864”] data set (comes with Orange installation), and for demonstration purposes selected only a handful of attributes.
By: BIOLAB, Dec 20, 2013
Paint Your Data
One of the widgets I enjoy very much when teaching introductory course in data mining is the Paint Data widget. When painting in this widget I would intentionally include some clusters, or intentionally obscure them. Or draw them in any strange shape. Then I would discuss with students if these clusters are identified by k-means clustering or by hierarchical clustering. We would also discuss automatic scoring of the quality of clusters, come up with the idea of a silhouette (ok, already invented, but helps if you get this idea on your own as well).
By: BLAZ, Oct 9, 2013
Brief History of Orange, Praise to Donald Michie
Informatica has recently published our paper on the history of Orange. The paper is a post-publication from a Conference on 100 Years of Alan Turing and 20 Years of Slovene AI Society, where Janez Demšar gave a talk on the topics. History of Orange goes all the way back to 1997, when late Donald Michie had an idea that machine learning needs an open toolbox for machine learning. To spark the development, we co-organized WebLab97 at beautiful Bled, Slovenia.
By: BLAZ, Oct 3, 2013
JMLR Publishes Article on Orange
Journal of Machine Learning Research has just published our paper on Orange. In the paper we focus on its Python scripting part. We have last reported on Orange scripting at ECML/PKDD 2004. The manuscript was well received (over 270 citations on Google Scholar), but it is now entirely outdated. This was also our only formal publication on Orange scripting. With publication in JMLR this is now a current description of Orange and will be, for a while :-), Orange’s primary reference.