I got a briefing from a new predictive analytics vendor, DMWay. DMWay was founded in 2014 based on significant research over the previous decades. DMWay had a first VC round in 2015, have 20+ employees and dozens of customers. DMWay is focused on democratizing data science and automating machine learning so that those with business domain expertise can leverage data science -without also having to be a hard-core data scientist. Plus the pricing is designed to be very aggressive to remove that barrier also.
As well documented, predictive analytics in many organizations is expensive, time consuming and not scalable. The need for strong technical skills means that those involved often lack the business domain expertise to understand the data.
DMWay has a very simple UI, designed to be very accessible to non-technical folks. It lays out a simple process – define the input data, document metadata, modeling.
- Input data is pointed to some existing flat file data and the tool automatically keeps a validation set etc.
- The structure of this data is then analyzed to build meta data that the business user can then extend or correct. The tool expects flattened but not analyzed or enriched data.
- The final step is to pick a modeling approach (from a set which, they claim, have undergone a rigorous selection process and been proven to create highly stable and accurate models) and run the process.
- The time from data input to initializing a run takes less than a minute.
The tool analyzes the data to find the right approach – binning, categorical variable identification, missing value handling etc. The engine identifies suppressing variables to eliminating correlation problems, overfitting, uses the validation data etc. – all automatically. The models created by DMWay are open for inspection by the user. The model is deployed either using their own scoring engine with a REST API or by generating R, Java or SQL code for either batch or real-time scoring.
Models can be grouped into project for management and a simple interface provides basic information about last run and last modified.
DMWay runs on premise on desktops or servers and the scoring engine similarly.
You can get more information on DMWay here. DMWay is a vendor in our Decision Management Systems Platform Technologies report.
