RapidMiner is great for many things except variable importance! All other major DM tools have it. That way, you can also assess the ranked ordered importance of variables in a predictive model. PLEASE!
Hmmm... yes, there's nothing obvious that I can see. Some Weka operators might have it built in. Otherwise you may need to use something like the R caret package integrated into your RM process. http://www.jstatsoft.org/v28/i05
I am not aware of variable importance on Weka or in R. I think this is what differentiates a professional tool from an experimental one. I cannot understanding the reasoning behind not including Variable Importance in RapidMiner. IT IS UNFORTUNATE!
The Weight By operators allow the influence of attributes on a label to be determined. The output is a set of weights where 1 means the attribute is relevant to the label and 0 means irrelevant.
There is also the Optimize Weights (Forward) operator which can contain a model and this might give something that is useful.
Contributor II
Answers
There is also the Optimize Weights (Forward) operator which can contain a model and this might give something that is useful.
Andrew
At first I thought I did a quick search on the forum I found this post relating to RandomForests and Variable Importance http://rapid-i.com/rapidforum/index.php?topic=417.0 which sent me off track.
Hopefully that's helped you out.