Introduction
Purpose
Rapidminer provides convenient tools for data loading, exploration, modelling, visualization.
UI and API
It comes with a nice GUI. It provides Java API. It also has a scripting interface.
Data types
(Bi or Poly) Nominal, Integer, Double, Varchar.
Processes
One can visualize the data mining process as a tree of operators. The leaf nodes correspond to the result nodes. Processes can be edited in the design view : here it looks like an electronic circuit. This is effectively programming using a GUI.
Operators
Operators are grouped under various categories: like Modeling, Data transformation, repository access, evaluation/ validation, process control (looping, conditions). These groups contains various subgroups.
Each operator has an input and output, and may require additional settings.
An operator may be nested: itself composed of sub-operators.
Data view
The data view has different tabs to show meta-data, the actual data, a good interface for plotting.
The meta-data view shows useful summary like mean and standard deviation for numeric data and, mode /min classes for nominal data.