Picalo

Picalo is a collaborative, open-source effort to produce a data analysis application suitable to auditors, fraud examiners, data miners, and other data analysts.

Picalo specializes in data retrieved from corporate databases, such as employee records and sales records, but it can be used generally for many different types of analyses.

The application takes almost no time to install and it doesn't come with a complicated setup that you would need to complete before you can check out its features. The foremost goal of Picalo is to create a worldwide repository of fraud detection and analysis routines called Detectlets.

Users can either use the built-in routines or write their own. Those who write their own can share their routines with others in the Picalo community. The goal is to create a large set of analysis routines that meet many different needs–on a scale that a single company could never do.

Picalo’s Detectlet framework allows those with scripting interest and ability to create wizard-based routines for others in their organizations. This helps bridge the gap between power users and others.

Picalo shows you the script code for everything you do in the GUI, and it includes a function composer to help you create function calls. Picalo includes advanced analysis routines not found in competing products. For example, it supports grouping by a number of days for analysis of labor and time card data.

Picalo can also automatically group records to achieve a specified degree of smoothness in data. Picalo’s scripting is based in Python, a powerful and easy-to-learn computer language.

The shell allows you to type commands one at a time to produce results–it’s like running a script one line at a time. When you run a full script in Picalo, all of the variables created in the script are available in the shell at its completion.

Picalo is a very nice application that allows you to analyze data with focus on fraud detection and data retrieved from corporate databases.