Introducing R, Rattle, and Qlik Sense Desktop

In this section, we will introduce the tools we'll use in this book: R, Rattle, and Qlik Sense Desktop.

R is a free programming language for statistics and graphics available under the terms of the Free Software Foundation's General Public License (GNU). The R language is widely accepted for statistical analysis and data mining. There is a big community of developers that develop new packages for R, such as Rattle.

R is a very powerful and flexible programming language, but to create predictive models with R you need to be a skilled programmer. For this reason, we will use Rattle.

Rattle is a Graphical User Interface (GUI) for data mining developed by Graham Williamson using R. Similar to R, Rattle is also licensed under the GNU. R and Rattle are the predictive analysis environments that we will be using in this book.

Using Rattle, we'll be able to load and prepare data, create a predictive model, and evaluate its performance without writing R code; Rattle will write the code for us.

In order to create a visual and intuitive application for the business user, we'll use Qlik Sense Desktop, the personal and free version of Qlik Sense. Qlik Sense is a self-service data visualization tool developed by Qlik.

We'll use Qlik Sense Desktop instead of Qlik Sense Enterprise because we want to build a free learning environment to develop the examples of this book. For the propose of this book, Qlik Sense Desktop and Qlik Sense are very similar. When you deploy your applications in Qlik Sense Enterprise, the platform provides you:

Qlik has two different tools for data analysis and data visualization: QlikView and Qlik Sense. Each tool is designed to solve a different problem:

We will use Qlik Sense Desktop instead of QlikView because the book is written for business users and analysts, and Qlik Sense is designed to provide business users with the ability to create visualizations on their data.

R and Rattle can be installed on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux, but Qlik Sense Desktop can only be installed on a Windows machine. For this reason, we will use a Windows-based computer for this book. Qlik Sense Desktop and R load all data into memory; we suggest that you use a 64-bit computer instead of a 32-bit computer.

In order to install R, Rattle, and Qlik Sense Desktop, you'll need administration rights, and an Internet connection to download the software.