I'll have to take a look. Some of the stuff I'm doing would be modifying an existing machine learning paradigm. I don't have the slightest idea of how ML works other than number go in, number come out. We'll see. I'll do some digging and see if I can find some tangentially related shit between what you've said and what I need to work on.
What about the "pretty" data visualization stuff? (heat maps, {insert fancy graphs here}, etc)
Yeah, that's a part of Power BI.
Great thing about Knime is that it lets you build your own machine learning models, with blackjack, and hookers.
But in all seriousness, it has full support for python, custom nodes, and a whole bunch of other community plug ins. I'm surprised it is open source, and free.
If you want to automate stuff on a commercial / corproate level, the enterprise licencing makes sense (just to automate dataflows, and such, but its still an absolute steal compared to what other vendors would charge for software half as useful)
(I almost signed that off like a work email, it's fucking Sunday, and I don't want to go back to work tomorrow)