I’ve never used RapidMiner so I couldn’t say. So Tableau isn’t a full fledged statistical tool. It does have all the basic statistical functions but it doesn’t really focus on that. What it is is a visualization tool. You can actually see and touch the data in multiple dimensions by slicing and dicing it.
Statistical tests are good but they are summary statistics. Often you can get a lot of insight by just looking at the raw data. Tableau lets you see the actual outliers and ask yourself why they are there and drilling down to find out more.
The simple act of looking at the data as-is and asking the questions — before jumping to statistical testing — is an underrated discipline because it seems too simple and unsophisticated. But it yields insights that many statistical techniques will not.
Statistical tests are good but they are summary statistics. Often you can get a lot of insight by just looking at the raw data. Tableau lets you see the actual outliers and ask yourself why they are there and drilling down to find out more.
The simple act of looking at the data as-is and asking the questions — before jumping to statistical testing — is an underrated discipline because it seems too simple and unsophisticated. But it yields insights that many statistical techniques will not.