neural net

Is Machine Learning v Domain expertise the wrong question?

April 5, 2012

KDNuggets had an interesting poll this week in which readers expressed themselves as Skeptical of Machine Learning replacing Domain Expertise. This struck me not because I disagree but because I think it is in some ways the wrong question:

Any given decision is made based on a combination of information, know-how and pre-cursor decisions.
The know-how can be [...]

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First Look – JMP Pro

August 10, 2011

I got my first look at JMP recently. JMP originally stood for “John’s Macintosh Project” apparently but is now a major business unit of SAS that has operated independently since 1989. It has about 180 employees and 250,000 users worldwide. The product has long since supported both Windows and Mac platforms and is a full [...]

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First Look – Modern Analytics

July 21, 2011

Modern Analytics was founded in 2001 by a team that originally met building analytical capabilities for a major European bank. They wanted to see if they could make it easier to deliver the kind of analytic infrastructure they had developed for the bank. Since then, they have worked in many industries and have developed this [...]

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Update – Angoss

April 18, 2011

I got an update from Angoss recently. It has been a while since I was updated on the product – I last blogged about 7.0 which was the last major release. 7.5 is an upgrade from this version –a maintenance release – with 7.6 planned for the end of 2011 and 8.0 due out around [...]

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Predictive Models are not Statistical Models

April 11, 2011

A reader of my company’s newsletter recently emailed me and asked me if I could
highlight the difference in how one approaches building a predictive model when compared to more “traditional” descriptive models. And why the approaches are different.
He went on to say that he had
a colleague who insists that developing aggregate statistical models is [...]

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Top 10 analytic mistakes

October 29, 2010

Syndicated from Smart Data Collective
One of my favorite presenters, John Elder, presented his top 10 analytic mistakes at Teradata Partners.
Lack Data is problem zero – obviously you need data to do data mining and analytics. Without data that is relevant to the problem you cannot use analytics to solve it. In particular [...]

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First Look – in2clouds

September 29, 2010

in2clouds is focused on helping companies use Predictive Analytics to improve their business performance. Founded by MicroStrategy alumni and launched in 2009, in2clouds is a small company that has been working in hi-tech, financial services and retail. Seeing analytics as “the next big thing” they want to reduce the friction for mainstream adoption and help [...]

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Fixing the BP Fund claims process

September 28, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ
I saw yet another article about the claims being paid by the BP Fund this weekend – BP fund czar promises bigger, faster claims – and it struck me that every time there is a disaster we go through this. Something happens, lots of people need to make claims, some process gets set [...]

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First Look – DataInfoCom

September 1, 2010

I caught up with DataInfoCom recently – a research-oriented software company headquartered in Austin, Texas. Their focus is on what they call Predictive Decision Management. Their software product, OSMOSYS, delivers predictive decisioning over the Internet – Decisions as a Service or DaaS as I call it. Their customers include a couple of well known, Fortune [...]

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Scorecards – one place where rules and analytics meet

August 18, 2010

Eric Charpentier had a nice introduction to scorecards overs on his blog. He does a nice job of describing an additive scorecard, that is a scorecard designed to represent a predictive analytic algorithm (not to be confused with a dashboard-like scorecard). He does not talk much about reason codes – the ability of a scorecard [...]

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First Look – Oracle Data Mining

April 27, 2010

I got an update on Oracle Data Mining – the in-database solution for data mining and predictive analytics offered by Oracle – recently. They have made ODM available on the amazon compute cloud so you can easily try it and they have been doing some interesting work on a new GUI and on integration with [...]

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Detect, prevent, manage claims fraud

April 12, 2010

Insurance claims fraud is a huge deal, with most estimates seeing perhaps 10% of claims made being fraudulent – worth at least $30Bn/year. As a result the value of small improvement is huge. Of course, from my perspective, fraud is one of the classic uses of decision management and predictive analytics. Obviously the current economic [...]

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First Look – Scorto

January 5, 2010

I caught up with a new (to me at least) decisioning platform recently. Scorto works with credit organizations to manage credit risks and make objective decisions when selling mass credit products. They offer what they refer to as decision support (but I would call blended decision management and decision support) in everything from personal/small commercial [...]

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First Look – SAS Enterprise Miner/Model Manager

December 3, 2009

The folks from SAS gave me a quick update the other day on SAS Enterprise Miner and SAS Model Manager, two of SAS’ data mining/predictive analytics products. I often blog about SAS, as you would expect, but I have not done any product posts. SAS’ Business Analytics Framework is focused on helping organizations find the [...]

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SAS customers and fraud detection

October 27, 2009

Another customer panel courtesy of SAS. This one had Rex Pruitt from Premier Bankcard (I blogged about how Premier put predictive analytics to work and Rex presented at Predictive Analytics World), Chris Swecker formerly of the FBI/Bank of America, Cameron Jones SAS’ Chief Compliance Officer and was moderated by Ellen Joyner. Fraud, obviously, is a [...]

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First Look – FICO Insurance Fraud Manager

October 20, 2009

I got a chance to catch up with Andrea Allmon of FICO to hear about their new Insurance Fraud Manager release (3.0 in July). This is a timely topic because of the debates around healthcare at the moment. In all the discussions about healthcare costs you never hear about the amount of fraud involved, yet [...]

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