Modelshop was founded by Tom Tobin, someone who has spent his career building analytic applications in credit origination, portfolio optimization, risk management and fraud detection for major financial institutions. Tom’s vision for Modelshop is to make the technologies that enable these types of solutions available to all organizations so they can make their analytics actionable. Modelshop got a round of seed funding about a year ago and has been building its team and product since. Now in beta with the platform Modelshop has a couple of lending customers focused on disruptive lending solutions as well as some others focused on portfolio management. The vision for Modelshop is to be a platform that allows companies to quickly create analytic applications that can automate sophisticated data-driven decisions in real-time to support mission critical operations, and to optimize these applications (and the decisions they make) over time. All running in public or private clouds.
The Modelshop platform allows you to model decisions, simulate these for expected outcomes, deploy them as real-time analytic applications with APIs, and predict future behavior and performance to optimize results over time. The platform is underlain by a computational engine that makes sophisticated real-time logic approachable and transparent. The decision models themselves are built by business analysts with data scientists focused on optimizing and improving decisioning over time. Deployment capabilities allow for integration with online applications, LOS etc.
A typical Modelshop application has:
- A Modelshop model starts with a set of business objects that can been defined. These have a set of properties and can be populated from connectors (to databases, APIs or XML/JSON). Objects can be related to each other by simply linking fields and additional calculated properties can be defined.
- This model and all the associated meta data can be viewed and edited in the tool. All this is defined in the business language – groovy – and an interactive editor allows things to be manipulated using it with auto complete etc.
- Calculations are strongly associated with these objects – they are defined as object properties. Calculations can share functions to allow similar calculations on several objects and inheritance is supported to allow these to be specialized, for instance to allow different classes of products to have different approaches to a calculation.
- All the objects and their relationships can be explored in a model graph visual editor allowing exploration. Additional links can be defined diagrammatically. Any specific instance of an object can be drilled into and the links for this instance can be navigated and calculations viewed in that context.
- Rule bases can be associated with an object and fire as soon as they need to – any data change causes rule firings. Rules use the same syntax as the calculation engine and build on the calculations defined for objects.
- R integration allows R to be executed in situ – data scientists can pick the objects to be integrated and an automatic data frame is created that can be processed using R. Model training, testing and scoring is handled in-situ by the engine. Scores are presented as object properties.
- The Modelshop calculation engine ensures that all values (calculations, cubes, rule results and model scores) are updated continuously using a proprietary dependency technology. Any change to data propagates events and immediately updates end results. For example, changing an address to a new zip code could trigger a cost of living model to increase a debt assumption that ultimately causes a credit decline decision. The update could be delivered back to a Modelshop user or via an API to an external application or website, all in real-time.
- Finally, Modelshop provides for multiple dashboard views with charts, data lists, document widgets and real-time cubes showing overall business performance. Like the rest of the environment this is HTML5, interactive and updated in real-time.
Modelshop is designed to integrate both a portfolio and real-time perspective while continuously updating all the calculations and providing a single environment for all the logic required to manage a complete analytic application.
More information on Modelshop is available here and anyone interested should contact them for access as they are moving into a public release. Modelshop is one of the vendors in our Decision Management Systems Platform Technology Report.
