A Gentle Introduction to KNIME
KNIME — A data Analytics/data science production software.
Introduction :
KNIME is a free open-source software to build and production data science without actually writing a single line of code.
Yes!! The Whole data science project doesn’t require coding for implementation end-to-end. Everything here is the pre-built Functions called “Nodes” , which we need to drag and drop to utilize the functions.
Functionalities of KNIME:
KNIME has almost every data science model and processing technique in several kinds of nodes, so that you can do everything from wrangling, processing data, Visualisation to building machine learning models. These nodes can be found in the Node Repository.
The Workflow Coach is an interesting segment that recommends the best nodes to use in your project based on the nodes you are selecting. This recommendation is based on the Global KNIME user's data.
The Workflow Editor is where you actually create your data science project by creating the flowchart.
The KNIME Hub consists of the Description tab where you could find the documentation of the processes within a node if you select a particular node.
The Node Monitor checks in with the transformations of the data happening with the node. By clicking the node you can view the particular node’s output in the Node monitor.
Working of KNIME :
To complete a data science project with KNIME, you just need to know the flow (steps) of the process that you need to do.
Nodes: Nodes are the pre-built data science methods that take a specific input and process the data and provide a specific output. Nodes may have multiple inputs and outputs based on their functions.
You just have to select the nodes from the node repository ,then drag and drop to the workspace editor. Provide the input to the node and receive the processed output and send the output to the succeeding node. You can also configure the nodes (models) to set the parameters and tuning by right-clicking the node and selecting ‘configure’ option . After configuring the Nodes connect each other in the specific order .So you will finally create a flowchart of the whole process like the one below.
Run the nodes one-by-one by right-clicking and selecting run / run and view option. Finally with the help of Scorer you could see the accuracy of the model.
That’s all. A complete data science project has been built within minutes. In the above Project (Image), I have done the Titanic Survival Prediction and got an 81% accuracy. KNIME is that Simple.
advantages :
The whole process is in a flowchart, Which leads to a better understanding of the process and makes it easy to explain.
The workflow creation is simple, convenient ,and time efficient.
Conclusion :
With an easy to use interface, wonderful documentations and provisions to a variety of pre-built functions, KNIME makes the data science process much simpler and hazel-free. With a free and opensource advantage, KNIME is definitely worth to give it a try.
