BI Seminar – MSIAD – BI new trends

It’s almost beginning the master degree entirely dedicated to Business Intelligence (BI) idealized by my main reference on BI: Dra Maria José Trigueiros that physically left us on year ago. This Master is held every two years and the season 2011-2013 will begin next October 2011. To formal present to the public this master, the ISCTE-IUL University in the person of Dr. Filipe Santos, decided to follow one of the Dra Maria Jose Trigueiros dream: A Business Intelligence seminar dedicated to the fourth edition of BI master! Wherever Dra Maria Jose Trigueiros is, I believe she is proud of this university and all the people that will make this dream come true.

If you are interested in BI and also were a Maria Jose Trigueiros student, I truly suggest you to be in ISCTE-IUL next Friday. BI demonstrations from DevScope (main Microsoft BI Portuguese partner), F5TCI (Qlickview) and SAS will be some of the amazing content that will be provided to you! Don’t miss this event!!!
Official website here

BI Dissertation – MSIAD

Today I finally publish the presentation of my master BI dissertation, that I defended last year. I do it to share my perspective and experience with you, but mainly because I know that it was one thing that the teacher Maria Jose Trigueiros would want to see, if she was with us. For that reason, I’m also writing an article about this dissertation with my advisor, the teacher Drº Orlando Belo, in order to submit it internationally.

For now the presentation is in Portuguese, but I can easily translate it to English if I get some requests to do it. Unlike most of the master's students, I do not hide my dissertation and I share it with pleasure. I hope it could be helpful to you at least, to get some ideas.
Regards.

BI Blog - Three Years Blogging - Thank You!

Starts to be a routine add a post to commemorate the anniversary of this blog. :-) It’s a project created 3 years ago with great passion and dedication, and therefore remains alive for this long time. This is the place where I described some of my many stories, tips, news and even some personal moments/events.

For those who thought three years ago that the blog was more like a joke, today maybe are surprised. It has over 100 posts on various subjects related to Business Intelligence… But I do not cross my arms and I'm already preparing something to further improve this blog, not only in design but also related to the content. The promised remote BI sessions mentioned in a previous post, will really start soon…

Naturally these three years of life are due also to the thousands of visitors who passed through this blog, from the simple readers, to those who placed questions or requested some opinions/feedback. I know that many of those visitors have yet unanswered questions due to my immense workload during the last year… nevertheless I’ll try to answer soon.

A special thank to a person that is the huge driver of BI in Portugal and is undoubtedly my main reference… the teacher Maria José Trigueiros. She’s not physically with us anymore, but for sure, she’s seeing what we are doing here.

Some numbers...

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This place will continue to be a meeting point for all those persons that have the same passion as me for Business Intelligence. Some more technical post’s continue to be published on BIResort community that I’m co-founder.

THANK YOU ALL

Pedro

Até breve professora!

I write this post in memory of the most important person for me in the Academic world. Unfortunately she left us yesterday, but I’ll never forget her. She’s an amazing person and all I have achieved in last 3 years is dedicated to her… The life is not fare! I never forget you teacher! Never! See you soon, I know that you’ll watching what we’ll doing here!

Maria José Forjaz Pacheco Trigueiros nasceu em 1956 em Cascais. Fez os seus estudos em Roma e em Caracas onde se licenciou em Matemática (1983, Universidade Central de Venezuela). Foi assistente estagiária na Universidade Simon Bulivar entre 1984 e 1986, onde obteve o título de Mestre em Ciências da Computação. Em Setembro de 1986 ingressou no ISCTE como assistente estagiária. Doutorou-se um 1994 em Investigação Operacional pelo Instituto Politécnico de Grenoble. Exerceu uma grande variedade de cargos académicos e actividade docente. À data do falecimento era professora auxiliar de nomeação definitiva no Departamento de Ciências e Tecnologias da Informação do ISCTE.

Missa de 7º dia por alma da professora Maria José Trigueiros no próximo dia 08 de Maio (sabado) pelas 19h00. Alguém não consegue ter saudades de um anjo como este?

Eternamente presente na minha memória e no meu coração.

BI Books - My Suggestions...

Following the request of many families :-), today I’m writing about my favorite books. In particular those I have read, those I'm reading right now, and those I’ll read soon relating to Business Intelligence world.

I have dozens or even hundreds of scanned or digital books, but there is nothing better and more motivating, than reading a book in the traditional format. All the books I have scanned into my computer, I never read them even after the print... the motivation is not the same and for that reason I always preferred to buy. The prices in Amazon website are cheap and even more, if you choose Amazon partner's stores. (In the images below you have each respective price attached)

The following books relate to the concept of Business Intelligence in general and how it fits with all its subsystems. The strategy, the processes, the people/knowledge and also something about the technological component. For those who follow the world certification in BI (CBIP), these books are essential for the examination in "Business Analytics":

              

The following books show the way to implement a successful Data Warehousing project. They were written by one of the greatest evangelists of Data Warehousing... (Ralph Kimball). These books focus on the dimensional modeling applied to multiple business scenarios and a complete life cycle that DW projects should follow. For those who follow the global certification in BI (CBIP), these books are essential for the examination of "Data Warehouse":

              

I also suggest more technical books which are more focused on Microsoft BI tools. These WROX books are very well structured, very easy to read and very helpful to understand better and fast. I’ll highlight the following books:

              

The following books are books very too simple and clearly explaining more deeply on what is behind this fantastic world of Data Mining:

              

Future purchases...
              

Currently Reading...
I am currently reading a book that promises to be very interesting. Not only by the positive feedback it has received, but also the important contribution of the author in TDWI/CBIP resources, that I’m always followed with great interest.

Keep tuned to this post because I'll be updating it with all the books I'm reading and some that have not put here yet! I hope I’ve helped you selecting your next book.

Regards, Pedro

BI Dissertation – Master degree done!

Finally I got my master degree on Decision Support Systems/ Business Intelligence. It was almost 2 years and half and finally I defended my dissertation yesterday. I want to thank all those people who always encouraged me to “fight” for this and special thanks to my supervised Dr. Orlando Belo (Universidade do Minho – Portugal), Steve Vanstone (Bonds University – Australia) and Dr. Chong (Chinese University of Hong Kong – China). (Check out the previous post I wrote about the dissertation here)

Check below the abstract of my dissertation that I’m thinking to translate to English for sending to all those people around the world that gave me feedback about their works and some support to my dissertation.

Abstract
"In the current economic environment, the value of information is increasingly important in the habits and customs of each citizen. Prices per barrel of oil, Euribor rates, equity indexes, inflation rate, among others, arrive everyday at our homes through the media. Their study is increasingly important, especially by the need to identify their impact on our daily quotidian.

The application of Data Mining (DM) techniques, in an attempt to predict the movement of the stock market, has never been a very well accepted, mainly by economists and the academic world. It is an area of high complexity, and the fact that it involves money, mean that their research, especially successful, is not made public. However, these techniques exist, and are increasingly used not only in financial markets, but also in practically all other activity sectors.

This dissertation begins by making an approach to the complex world of the stock market, in an attempt to demystify it a little. Subsequently, based on investment rules normally applied by practitioners, it’s presented a model of an artificial neural network, which provides in a daily basis, the decision to buy, hold or sell a particular asset, supported by a decision support system to monitor and analyze the evolution of the made decisions."

Keywords: Decision Support Systems, Data Mining, Knowledge Discovery in Data, Business Intelligence, ETL, Data Warehousing

I also added some screenshots of dissertation presentation I made yesterday… if you’ll be curious about the data mining model results, just tell me and I will translate all slides.


I hope you enjoy this. Regards,
Pedro.

MSIAD - Stock Market with Data Mining (BI Thesis)

I was a little absent this month in preparation for my thesis ... I promise to write more often now! Yesterday was my first battle on my dissertation, which I think it was well reached. Naturally, any research in this complex world of stock markets, in this case of applying data mining techniques, requires first understanding the financial world... I tried to demystify the complex stock market world... His movement, the factors that influence decision making, forecasting and the investor that feeds this whole game markets... and it was presented yesterday

After understanding the stock market as I did, I‘ll now focus on the application of Data Mining techniques (initially only with neural networks) and the implementation of a strategy that will be based from all rules made public by some researchers. That is, I will create a decision support system that in addition to track my portfolio of shares, it’ll generate the final output of the day that will be a buy, sell or hold signal.My strategy will assume the loss and also fix a limit on earnings. I do not need to be monitoring the stock market during the day, because I will use Stop Loss functionality in all investments that fire automatically an order of sale if the price of some share will excess my defined limit (applied only if I’m on the market)

In this matter, I'll then begin to examine in more detail the research of Dr. Chong from Chinese University of Hong Kong, that he’s the only economist, investor and researcher I know at the moment and who kindly offered me help and sent me all Articles that he has done. Dr. Chong is in the photo at right. Check his website at :

http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/eco/staff/tlchong/tlchong3.htm

I already have done ETL processes to import historical data from a group of stock in my folder and a Datamart that stores the data in the form of information. It’s time to deepen into practice and return in May for a short presentation to be evaluated again. I assume the risk of this project that it’s very ambitious and attractive to me.

With nothing to lose! Regards!

Pedro