Nonprofit Organizational Assessment

SAS and its Enterprise Miner
Sidetrade
Stata
Statgraphics
Statistica
Tibco Software
Beside these software packages, specific tools have also been developed for industrial
applications. For example, Watchdog Agent Toolbox has been developed and optimized
for predictive analysis in prognostics and health management applications and is
available for MATLAB and LabVIEW.
The most popular commercial predictive analytics software packages according to the
Rexer Analytics Survey for 2013 are IBM SPSS Modeler, SAS Enterprise Miner, and
Dell Statistica.
PMML
The Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML) was proposed for standard language
for expressing predictive models. Such an XML-based language provides a way for the
different tools to define predictive models and to share them. PMML 4.0 was released in
June, 2009.
Criticism
There are plenty of skeptics when it comes to computers' and algorithms' abilities to
predict the future, including Gary King, a professor from Harvard University and the
director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. People are influenced by their
environment in innumerable ways. Predicting perfectly what people will do next requires
that all the influential variables be known and measured accurately. "People's
environments change even more quickly than they themselves do. Everything from the
weather to their relationship with their mother can change the way people think and act.
All of those variables are unpredictable. How they will impact a person is even less
predictable. If put in the exact same situation tomorrow, they may make a completely
different decision. This means that a statistical prediction is only valid in sterile
laboratory conditions, which suddenly isn't as useful as it seemed before."
In a study of 1072 papers published in Information Systems Research and MIS
Quarterly between 1990 and 2006, only 52 empirical papers attempted predictive
claims, of which only 7 carried out proper predictive modeling or testing.
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